ABSTRACT
During the last 15 years voluntary agreements (VAs) have increasingly gained importance as an instrument of environmental policy (Börkey et al. 1999; CEC 1996a). Looking back on a longer tradition-for example, in the fields of chemical policy-voluntary and co-operative approaches are now rapidly penetrating other areas such as greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation (Krarup and Ramesohl 2000). Being from the very beginning a phenomenon of remarkably high practical relevance, interestingly the theoretical foundation of voluntary approaches has developed more slowly, and the bulk of research work on VAs was carried out in the second half of the 1990s. Influenced by the dominating regulatory and economic foundations of environmental policy, for the most part VAs have been examined from the perspective of legal science-for example, with regard to the contractual nature of agreements, and from the view of (neoclassical) economics, especially concerning the aspect economic cost-efficiency.1
