ABSTRACT
Our research on environmental policy specifications regulating commercial forestry operations around the world has opened up what was hitherto treated, by most comparative and international relations scholars, as a ‘black box’. The sheer complexity of regulations in some jurisdictions explains, in part, why such comparative work has been absent or limited. Our classification framework directly addressed these challenges by focusing on key structural attributes of policy requirements on the one hand and their actual thresholds on the other. And by focusing inductively on any policy arena that carried the force of the state (including legislation, regulations and agency policy directives), we differ from comparative work that focuses solely on distinguishing legislative and judicial approaches (Howlett, 1994) or differences in national and sub-national styles of regulations (Eisner, 1993; Hoberg, 1997). Our approach illustrates to students of the policy process in general, and of environmental regulations specifically, that there exist identifiable patterns of policy approaches that both unite and distinguish specific cases in ways that were previously largely hidden. Uncovering these trends allows us to identify critical research questions and preliminary hypotheses with which to guide future research.
