MacDONALD,Douglas <br/><br/>
Coerciveness and the selection of environmental policy instruments 

 -  2001 
<br/><br/> Degree of coerciveness is often used to categorize policy instruments. This article analyses the relative coerciveness associated with the instruments used by municipal, provincial and federal governments in Canada to address three major successive pollution threats - sewage, industrial toxic waste, andgreenhouse-gas emissions - that have appeared on the policy agenda over the course of the past century. During that time, there has been an overall trend of declining coerciveness, with one exception. In the case of toxic, waste, established regulatory regimes were made more coercive some years after they were first put in place. These findings can best be explained by theories of instrument choice that look to interactions among relevant state and societal actors in the policy network. It is suggested that one aspect of that process in particular - the balance of power between regulator and "regulatee"- is of importancein explaning relative coerciveness. We must first understand the ability of the regulator to coerce before we can explain the selection of more or less coercive instruments