ABSTRACT
We have seen that more and more people in the West have climbed to the fourth step of their environmental hierarchy of needs, a stage in which the quality of the ecosystems becomes the priority. We also noted that working towards this goal implies that all parties in the environmental arena – government, environmental scientists, NGOs and, of course, industry – have increasingly to cooperate to come up with environmental solutions that meet the criteria of effectiveness, efficiency and equity. 1 Moreover, in the discussion of the PLC, we argued that as environmental problems become more complex and their solutions more costly and cumbersome, the players begin to realize they know too little about the others to independently generate, evaluate and implement options that satisfy 3E criteria.
