Testing the state environmental protection literature in a nonregulatory policy arena: implementation of pollution prevention policy in California and Colorado

Despite the litany of studies examining state environmental protection efforts, few studies have examined environmental policy arenas where target compliance is voluntary and incentives based rather than mandatory and command-and-control. One such nonregulatory approach is pollution prevention policy, an alternative environmental protection strategy that shifts the focus from downstream mitigation strategies to upstream reduction strategies. This article uses the extant policy literature to analyze implementation of pollution prevention policy in California and Colorado. The findings indicate that the extant environmental protection literature produces mixed results, when applied to the pollution prevention policy arena. Of the five variables tested, only three produced findings consistent with previous research, suggesting that nonregulatory policy arenas differ enough from regulatory policy arenas that they require different causal explanations.