ABSTRACT
Voluntary environmental agreements (VEAs) have been used as a tool of environmental policy in the Czech Republic for only a short period of time, and, until recently, to a rather limited extent. While unilateral commitments by polluters as well as public voluntary schemes initiated by public authorities have been implemented to a limited extent since about the middle of the 1990s, negotiated VEAs are still not very common. By the end of 1999 public schemes (environmental management systems [EMSs] or ISO standards) were believed to have been adopted by about 50 companies. However, only two voluntary negotiated environmental agreements had been registered by that date.
