A policy portfolio approach to plastics throughout their life cycle: Supranational and national regulation in the European Union

IF 3 3区 社会学 Q2 ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
Sandra Eckert, Orr Karassin, Yves Steinebach
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Abstract

The environmental and health problems caused by plastics throughout their life cycle have attracted considerable public attention over the past decade, triggering policy responses in many constituencies. Similarly, interdisciplinary research on plastics has been burgeoning in the past few years, and political science contributions have covered the manifold root causes and consequences of this shift in public policy including media coverage, evolving discourses and policy agendas. In view of this policy relevance that drives scholarly inquiry, it is surprising that we lack a systematic assessment of the actual policy outputs. This article fills this lacuna by developing a policy portfolio approach to plastic regulation. To illustrate and substantiate our approach, we provide an exploratory analysis of EU plastics regulation over the last twenty years, complementing this with Denmark, Germany, and Poland as diverse cases of member state regulation. Overall, our research shows that the number of policy measures targeting plastics has massively increased both at the supranational and national level. This policy growth, however, varies across policy targets and instruments. Our findings highlight first, that the policy targets addressed are mainly located at the end of the plastics life cycle; and second, that the instrument choice is privileging the use of hierarchical forms of intervention over the use of market- or information-based instruments. We discuss these features of the policy portfolio approach in light of existing research on plastics and life-cycle-oriented policy approaches such as the Circular Economy.

Abstract Image

针对塑料整个生命周期的政策组合方法:欧洲联盟的超国家和国家法规
在过去十年中,塑料在其整个生命周期中造成的环境和健康问题引起了公众的极大关注,并在许多方面引发了政策反应。同样,在过去几年中,有关塑料的跨学科研究也在蓬勃发展,政治学方面的研究成果涵盖了公共政策转变的多方面根源和后果,包括媒体报道、不断演变的论述和政策议程。鉴于这种政策相关性推动了学术研究,但令人惊讶的是,我们缺乏对实际政策产出的系统评估。本文通过制定塑料法规的政策组合方法来填补这一空白。为了说明和证实我们的方法,我们对欧盟过去二十年的塑料法规进行了探索性分析,并将丹麦、德国和波兰作为成员国法规的不同案例加以补充。总体而言,我们的研究表明,无论是在超国家层面还是在国家层面,针对塑料的政策措施数量都在大幅增加。然而,不同政策目标和手段的政策增长情况各不相同。我们的研究结果突出表明,首先,所针对的政策目标主要位于塑料生命周期的末端;其次,在手段的选择上,优先采用分级干预的形式,而不是基于市场或信息的手段。我们将根据现有的塑料研究和以生命周期为导向的政策方法(如循环经济)来讨论政策组合方法的这些特点。
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来源期刊
Environmental Policy and Governance
Environmental Policy and Governance ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES-
CiteScore
6.10
自引率
13.30%
发文量
67
期刊介绍: Environmental Policy and Governance is an international, inter-disciplinary journal affiliated with the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE). The journal seeks to advance interdisciplinary environmental research and its use to support novel solutions in environmental policy and governance. The journal publishes innovative, high quality articles which examine, or are relevant to, the environmental policies that are introduced by governments or the diverse forms of environmental governance that emerge in markets and civil society. The journal includes papers that examine how different forms of policy and governance emerge and exert influence at scales ranging from local to global and in diverse developmental and environmental contexts.
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