Green Economy Policy

Making progress towards an ecologically more sustainable economy requires major attitudinal and behavioural changes both on the supply (producer) and the demand (consumer/citizen) side. Whether and to what extent voluntary green economy initiatives by the private sector can contribute to a more sustainable economy remains uncertain and disputed. This is partly because we know rather little about how such measures affect the demand side, especially in terms of public demand by stakeholders and citizens for stricter government-led policies in the environmental realm. In principle, voluntary private sector initiatives could help enhance environmental standards across the economy, both driven bottom-up and via more ambitious government laws and regulations. However, such initiatives could also weaken stakeholder and mass public pressure for stricter government intervention and crowd out pro-environmental attitudes.

Within our contribution to ‘external page National Research Programme 73: Sustainable Economy’ (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation) we examine how voluntary corporate green economy initiatives affect demand among citizens for stricter environmental monitoring and standard setting by government, and whether such effects differ across environmental issues and types and ambition levels of voluntary initiatives. We further investigate, which collaborative efforts between the private sector, civil society and the government citizens support, and how these multi-stakeholder efforts affect democratic accountability. As a result, we contribute towards a more complete understanding of stakeholders’ strategic options in green economy policy debates. Ultimately, these insights can help policy-makers, civil society organizations as well as private sector actors to identify types of corporate green economy initiatives that synergize with government monitoring and standard setting.

Contacts: Dennis Kolcava, Thomas Bernauer