Indirect Regulation: A Remedy to Cure the Defects of European Environmental Policy? – The EMAS-Regulation

The Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) belongs to new forms of reflexive or indirect regulation in European environmental policy. The development of European environmental policy is outlined in respect to indirect regulation. By the example of EMAS the paper analyses the impacts of indirect regulation. At the first level the analysis focuses on the EMAS-participation within the European Union emphasising that EMAS turns out to be more a German rather than a European project. At the second level the analysis concentrates on the effects of EMAS-participation in respect to in-company processes of ecological modernisation as well as to external, mainly market-based impacts. The results are ambivalent: Positive effects are an improved level of in-company environmental protection and enhanced legal compliance. However, innovative potentials to organisational environmental learning are only partly exhausted. Market effects and improved relationships to external stakeholders seldom occur. To attribute these outcomes to specific instruments of environmental regulation would negate the multi-level and multi-centred institutional setting of European environmental policy. Therefore, starting points for a more effective European environmental policy are discussed, which combine aspects and instruments of direct and indirect regulation. Moreover, options to increase the participation of firms in EMAS are outlined.