Changing Things — Moving People

Book excerpt: This book results from a pioneering effort to organize a productive interdisciplinary research program on sustainable development policy in a small country not previously recognized as a world leader in environmental social science. The results are very promising, considering the short time frame and the high barriers to success for such an enterprise - differences in concepts and terminology, disciplinary myopia, and the inherent difficulty of the problem. In the USA, where I work, these barriers continue to pose major challenges after some 30 years of effort. Switzerland has made noteworthy progress in only five. I hope this book represents the beginning of a long term effort at problem-oriented interdisciplinary collaboration among Swiss researchers and prac titioners. The Swiss group has succeeded in developing a unifying framework that makes a major contri bution to environmental policy analysis. The framework broadens policy thinking by giving se rious treatment to underutilized strategies that rely on communication and informal influence as well as to well-studied ones that rely on technological change, regulation, and economic forces. This broad typology makes it easier for an analyst to escape the tendency to presume that the po licy instrument currently in fashion, whether it be market-based instruments, voluntary measures, or whatever, is the right strategy for all problems. It also encourages discipline-based analysts to consider how their favored strategies might be combined with other strategies less familiar to them, and thus to craft strategies that can take advantage of the strengths of various policy instruments.