The Policy Is Just the Beginning: How Implementation Makes Environmental Policy Cheaper and Easier Than Expected

Passing environmental policy is difficult, because of the – reasonable – concern that it will increase costs. But implementation often leads to systemic changes that make environmental regulation cheaper and easier to implement than expected. 

In the Energy Policy Seminar, Beth DeSombre examined domestic and international regulations to protect the ozone layer, and aspects of the U.S. Clean Air Act regulating power plant and automobile emissions, identifying four specific pathways through which system changes contribute to decreasing costs: disruption of standard operating procedures, innovation, increased availability of alternatives, and creation of enabling mechanisms. Understanding how the implementation of regulations can decrease costs can suggest better or worse approaches to crafting and implementing policy.

Co-Sponsors: Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard University Center for Environment, Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability

About the Speaker

Elizabeth R. DeSombre (Beth) DeSombre is the Camilla Chandler Frost Professor of Environmental Studies at Wellesley College, and was a fellow in 2023-4 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford. Much of her work is on international environmental politics, with a focus on issues of the global commons. Recent research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, and the Social Science Research Council. She has published eight books, including Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things (Oxford University Press, 2018) and What is Environmental Politics? (Polity, 2020), and has won multiple book prizes. Her current project (still in progress) is about how the implementation of environmental policy can (and often does) make it cheaper and easier than anyone predicted. She is also a folk singer-songwriter.

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