| Sumario: | Part of a special section on the evolution of environmental politics and policies. The writer assesses whether strategies that rely on information instead of command-and-control regulation could be an effective method of meeting environmental quality goals. Despite the success of the command-and-control approach, it is generally considered that this technique, by itself, cannot carry the burden for future environmental improvements. This is because the approach by itself has faults and because many of the current environmental issues do not optimally lend themselves to this strategy. Although relatively little has been reported on the use of information as a tool for achieving environmental enhancement, it deserves greater attention because there are potential advantages to its further development. At a minimum, more information can play an efficient complementary role to other environmental management tools, and at a maximum, it can practically transform the essence of environmental protection from an adversarial, compliance-driven activity to a consensus-based, fully internalized method of sustainable development.
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