自愿型环境规制:研究进展及未来展望

环境规制工具的选择决定了生态环境保护的成效,环境规制研究也是当前资源环境领域的研究热点之一。根据政府赋予被规制对象自由裁量权空间从小到大,可以将规制工具分为纯粹政府规制、元规制、自我规制、无约束的自由四种类型。既有研究对传统的纯粹政府规制工具给予了大量的关注,相比而言,对元规制和自我规制等自愿型环境规制工具的关注相对较少。已有的自愿型环境规制的研究主要从俱乐部物品理论、制度主义理论、利益相关者理论等视角出发,探讨自愿型环境规制的供给和需求问题。自愿型环境规制工具作为一种俱乐部物品,实践中面临的最大挑战在于如何克服企业的“搭便车”行为。现有的实证研究分别将自愿型环境规制作为自变量和因变量,分别探究①自愿型环境规制对企业环境绩效和经济创新绩效的影响,以及②企业参与自愿型环境规制的内外部动因。对比国内外文献我们发现,目前基于中国的社会经济背景下的自愿型环境规制的研究非常欠缺,这主要是因为中国在环境规制领域具有长期使用纯粹政府规制工具的传统,自愿型环境规制的实践较为欠缺,目前在中国实践较为广泛的自愿型环境规制工具仅有ISO14001环境管理体系以及化工行业的“责任关怀”体系。最后,本文基于现有对于中国自愿型环境规制研究的不足,展望了未来研究可能的方向。我们认为既有对于自愿型环境规制的研究更多关注对企业绩效的因果效应,而对其如何影响企业绩效的因果机制识别不足;此外,现有文献很少将中国特色的政治、经济、社会因素纳入自愿型环境规制的研究领域,未来的研究应当多从这两个方面着手深入。

Voluntary environmental program: research progress and future prospect

The selection of environmental regulation instruments determines the effect of environmental protection.Government can either leave the regulated firms with complete discretion to act according to their own interests,or impose regulations of taking that discretion away.According to the discretion left to regulated firms by the government,the regulatory instruments can be divided into pure government regulation,meta-regulation,self-regulation and unrestrained freedom.A lot of attention has been paid to the conventional regulation,while little attention has been paid to the voluntary environmental program(VEP)such as meta-regulation and self-regulation.The extant research on voluntary environmental program mainly discusses the supply and demand of voluntary environmental program from the perspectives of club goods theory,institutionalism theory and stakeholder theory.As a kind of club goods,the biggest challenge of designing voluntary environmental program is how to overcome the‘free-riding’behavior of the regulated firms.Existing empirical studies take voluntary environmental program as independent variable and dependent variable respectively to explore①the impact of voluntary environmental program on firm’s environmental performance and economic/innovation performance,and②the internal and external motivation of participating in voluntary environmental program.By comparing Chinese and foreign literature,we find that there is a lack of research on voluntary environmental program based on China's social and economic background,mainly because China has a long tradition of using conventional regulation instrument in the realm of environmental regulation,and the practice of voluntary environmental program is relatively deficient.At present,the most widely practiced VEPs in China are ISO14001 and Responsible Care in chemical industry.Finally,based on the existing literature on voluntary environmental program in China,this paper looks forward to the possible research direction in the future.We argue that①the extant studies on VEPs pays more attention to the causal effect on corporate performance rather than causal mechanism of how VEPs affect firms’performance,while②few studies identified China’s contextual factors.These gaps need to be filled in future research.