Environmental Policy for Developing Countries

摘要

Most developing countries have long since established laws and formal governmental structures to address their serious environmental problems, but few have been successful in alleviating those problems. The development banks, which control resources desperately needed by the developing countries, are promoting the use of economic incentives and other market-based strategies as the key to more effective environmental protection. However, the donors have rarely asked whether the approaches they are urging, which have recently had some success in Europe and the United States, can be implemented effectively in developing countries with limited resources and little experience with market-based policies of any kind. We worry that these highly sophisticated instruments have been pushed too hard and too fast, and that those who promote them say little about the context and conditions in which they thrive. The targets of this advice should be better informed about everything they would need to do to make market-based instruments work. Otherwise, the cause of environmental protection itself may be dealt a blow when ill-conceived policies divert a country's energies without producing the desired result. Developing-world regulators, already marginalized in their own countries, will have little to show for their efforts in terms of a cleaner environment.