Introduction to part III

This part of the book deals with the policy lessons suggested by our study of environmental dilemmas. In the last part, we have been led by the question to what extent and in what ways the attitudes and behaviour of our respondents deviate from the self-interested stance that characterizes an actual contributor's dilemma, taking due account of the differences presented by the three cases of environmental collective action. Now we want to focus on what may follow from this in respect of the design of policies that attempt to deal with these and similar problems. While the general direction of these two questions may seem straightforward enough, the last question is set against the particular background of Dutch environmental policy. The results of part II thus need to be reconsidered in the light of self-regulation policies. As we described in chapter 2, such policies seek to convince citizens that their environmental behaviour presents problems of voluntary collective action, and that they have a moral responsibility to cooperate towards the solution of these problems, at least to the extent sufficient for meeting the quantitative targets for reducing various emissions of pollutants. In the national environmental plans, several of these specific targets have been assigned to the group of consumers. A hallmark of the self-regulation approach is to address the consumers in their roles as citizens in order to obtain active compliance with the objectives of the plans.