There is by now a sizable collection of books that compare the environmental politics and policies of different countries. Some approach environmental policymaking as an exercise in political theory and examine how local political and economic considerations drive local and international environmental regulations (The Political Economy of Environmental Protection: Analysis and Evidence, R. D. Congleton, 1995). Others examine the determinants of such policies or address international questions of negotiation, regulation, and compliance (Globalization and the Environment, Schulze and Ursprung, 2001; The Political Economy of Environmental Regulation, Stavins, 2004). This book focuses on contemporary policies and policy tools themselves, broadly interpreted. What kinds of policies do we see adopted? How were those policies justified, and how well have they succeeded in advancing environmental ends?

Michael Hatch's volume analyzes the full spectrum of policies that have been adopted, albeit mostly in the developed countries of the United States, Germany, and Japan. What is nearly unique about this book is that it provides considerable coverage of nongovernmental environmental policies, such as labeling and voluntary emissions targets, as well as conventional regulatory policies. Coverage includes mainstream tax and regulatory policies, joint private–government enterprises such as effluent markets, and entirely voluntary programs. By analyzing the full spectrum of possible policies, the book provides a very nice casebook for a variety of environmental politics, policy, and economic courses.

Several authors point out that the use of voluntary agreements and environmental labeling to address contemporary environmental concerns began at about the same time as command-and-control methods of environmental protection, but have been neglected in most work on environmental regulation. Voluntary regulation schemes involving labeling and certification are discussed for forestry in particular (Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Chapter 3), and for a broad range of other industrial, commercial, and consumer products (Edda Müller, Chapter 2, Eric Welch and Miranda A. Shreurs, Chapter 4, and Hatch, Chapter 5). Policies that combine private and governmental institutions are discussed in some of the labeling programs, where governments often are significant purchasers of labeled products. Voluntary agreements between firms and government are discussed for Japan and Germany (Chapters 4 and 5) and also in the chapter on emissions trading between and within firms (Gary C. Bryner, Chapter 8). The existence of voluntary programs implies that government is not always necessary for solving public goods problems, although in many cases the programs put in place were encouraged and helped along by governmental decisions. For example, many governments purchase “labeled products” for their own use or require others that contract with the government to do so.

The more studied command-and-control and tax methods of governmental regulation are analyzed in Chapters 6, 8, and 9, with emphasis on specific environmental taxes in Germany, and the effects of environmental impact statements and the Clean Air Acts in the United States. The analyses are very accessible, moderate in tone, balanced, and carefully done.

The individual policy overviews are, for the most part, inductive rather than theoretical. The chapters summarize various negotiations among interest groups and government agencies that “caused” various programs to be adopted and note some general results of policy. Electoral pressures are mentioned, if at all, only in passing. Some of these details will already be known to readers, but many of them will not. Many of the cases are quite interesting and provide puzzles for future theoretical research and class discussions. For example, the chapter on emissions trading notes that the remediation costs associated with sulfur trading turned out to be far lower than early estimates had indicated. Estimated compliance costs have fallen from $4.9 billion to less than $2 billion per year (p. 178). As it turns out, compliance costs fell for a variety of reasons—some of which might have been predicted at the onset. For example, other regulations were subsequently modified to reduce legal barriers to using low-sulfur coal. This suggests that policy decisions are not entirely independent of one another, as new incentives can induce further consideration of regulations that discourage the use of cost-effective methods for reducing emissions. In principle, more formal efforts to model and forecast compliance costs should take such interdependencies into account, although this is rarely, if ever, done.

My main complaints about Environmental Policymaking is that it focuses a bit too narrowly on recent environmental regulations in developed countries, and that too little quantitative work on the effectiveness of the voluntary and coercive policies is included. The latter might have been intentional, insofar as it allows the authors to avoid raising the ideological hackles that plague most post mortems of environmental policy, but it also reduces the book's ability to access the relative merits of the broad cross section of contemporary policy instruments analyzed in the volume. Another complaint is that the book's title reveals relatively little about the volume's focus. The book is far less about environmental policymaking than it is about environmental policy, per se. The individual chapters provide only fairly cursory analyses of how specific environmental policies actually came to be adopted and implemented, and the short concluding chapter provides little in the way of assessment. Generally, all the authors assume that a policy that claims to improve environmental quality does so, although this has not always been the case in international policy areas (Murdoch and Sandler, 1997, Journal of Public Economics 63(2), 331–49).

Overall, however, the book is a very useful contribution to the literature on environmental policy, and a valuable collection of case studies that will be of interest to policymakers and teachers of political science and economic courses on environmental issues.