Regulating the polluters: markets and strategies for protecting the global environment

Climate change, tropical deforestation, biodiversity loss, ozone, depletion, hazardous wastes, and ocean pollution are among the environmental issues that have bought national governments together in a common purpose. As they have worked to mitigate these global problems, national governments have developed a wide variety of environmental regime designs. They have created complex systems of global rules and institutions to enable and incentivize private and public actors to meet the challenges posed by global pollution. Why have national governments created different international rules and institutions to address global environmental issues? This work demonstrates that national governments have developed different institutional responses to global issues because the markets producing environmental pollution impose varying constraints and create varying opportunities for change

Why have national governments created different international rules and institutions to address global environmental issues? Alexander Ovodenko argues that this variation can be explained by looking to a dynamic that has been thus far downplayed by the literature on global environmental governance: the structures of industries regulated by environmental rules. Regulating the Polluters inverts the literature on regulatory capture and collective action by presenting empirical evidence of the irony of market power in global environmental politics.