Breaking the Deadlock – Voluntary Agreements and Regulatory Measures in German Waste Management

Based on three German case studies in the field of waste management, the paper argues that the use of voluntary agreements does not necessarily conflict with the use of traditional command-and-control regulation within the same issue area as it is often suggested in the public and political science debate. The case studies – the voluntary agreement on the collection and recovery of spent batteries, the voluntary agreement on the environmentally sound management of end-of-life-vehicles, and the packaging ordinance – demonstrate that at least in the area of product related measures the general assumption of an opposition between voluntary and command-and-control measures has to be disputed. Voluntary agreements do not exclusively replace regulatory measures or vice versa. Rather, they show that in the area of product related waste policy top-down regulation and self-commitments increasingly supplement each other or are even combined. Altogether they reveal a certain differentiation in the use of voluntary agreements and regulatory measures in German waste policy. As the case of packaging waste and ELV-Management suggest, the result may be a policy-mix which seems more capable of reaching and effectively influencing a very heterogeneous network of actors and coping with the different dimensions of environmental problems than voluntary agreements or command-and-control regulation alone. The decisions whether voluntary agreements and/ or regulatory measures are implemented depends on the political feasibility, the structure of the actor network and (also related with the latter) the problem structure. The increasing use of voluntary agreements can be interpreted as an enlargement of the traditional set of environmental policy instruments rather than a substitution of regulatory for voluntary measures. It contributes to a modification and differentiation in the use and function of instruments in environmental policy.