Book
National Environmental Policies

A Comparative Study of Capacity-Building With a Data Appendix : International Profiles of Changes since 1971

This book is a collection of systematically prepared case studies describing the environmental policy of thirteen countries in terms of capacity-building. Capacity for environmental policy and management, as the concept is used in this volume, has been defined broadly as a society's "ability (...) to devise and implement solutions to environmental issues as part of a wider effort to achieve sustainable development" (OECD). Since the late 1960s capacity-building in environmental policy and management can be observed across the world. It may have made insufficient progress as yet from an environmentalist point of view, but it has produced some remarkable results, and not only in the industrialised world. In the first chapter we present the conceptual framework that underlies the national case studies. In the course of our research project the authors of the book met together twice to discuss this framework in the light of the national experi­ences and to harmonise their approaches. In this way we have tried to offer more than a collection of individual and incoherent case studies, focusing only on specific environmental problems, institutions, actors, or instruments. The idea behind this book is to give a systematic, comparative overview of the fundamental conditions under which environmental policies is practised in selected countries.

Table of contents
  1. 1. The Political System's Capacity for Environmental Policy
    Martin Jänicke
  2. 2. United States
    Richard N. L. Andrews
  3. 3. Sweden
    Lennart J. Lundqvist
  4. 4. Japan
    Hidefumi Imura
  5. 5. United Kingdom
    Albert Weale
  6. 6. The Netherlands
    Hans Th. A. Bressers, Loret A. Plettenburg
  7. 7. Germany
    Martin Jänicke, Helmut Weidner
  8. 8. Denmark
    Mikael Skou Andersen
  9. 9. Switzerland
    Peter Knoepfel
  10. 10. Korea
    Young-Suck Na
  11. 11. Chile
    Eduardo Silva
  12. 12. China
    Yu-Shi Mao
  13. 13. Nigeria
    Fatai Kayode Salau
  14. 14. Russia
    Ivan Potravny, Ulrich Weissenburger
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