The government and LCA's

LCA’s can give clear indications on which part of a products or process life cycle is impactful. It can even pinpoint very specific aspects. For example, it can show whether the environmental impact gets ‘outsourced’ to other countries or determine whether there are specific steps in a life cycle which have a high impact. To incorporate LCA’s in the development and assessment of products is a direct way of identifying and showing where our environmental impact can be decrease. This first step in identification of our impact can guide further discussions for how to lower it. 

The question at hand is now how the government can increase the use of LCA’s. Four different ways are proposed in this blog. A government can exert control on the social system in different ways. Either they directly try to control what happens, they give a threat out that actors have to obey the rules and hope for self-regulation or they set up specific boundary conditions in which the actors have to play. The external control generally takes up the form of making rules for actors in the system and then making sure they obey by the rules. 

The first way a government can increase the use of LCA’s immediately follows out of the boundary conditions. One of the main hurdles for LCA’s is the limited amount of information available. If the available information is more accurate and abundant, LCA’s will be more easy to perform, taking up less time and taking up less resources. By doing this, the accurateness of the LCA’s might also drastically increase. This in turn can have a positive feedback on the usefulness of LCA’s in the political system. Practically, the governments can help with the distribution of information by setting up information sharing platforms or legal terms that protect the information that gets shared by businesses. Thus, in this case the government collects the LCA data from private organizations. This would be setting up boundary conditions, however, because they need to enforce companies to give away data to the government this must be termed external control.

Secondly, companies could be obliged to perform and publicly share an LCA on their physical products after 5 years of the start-up. This has to be after an initial period, arbitrarily 5 years, as it might take up some resources of the company which are heavily needed in the first years. This could be facilitated by having the LCA’s sent together with tax declarations as to facilitate and centralize the operations for the government. In this case, the government threatens with fines so the companies do it themselves. This could be termed as threat of external control. The gravity of making the LCA’s will push the companies to reevaluate the way they operate themselves. 

One other way to increase the use of LCAs is by embedding it in the monitoring procedures of the government. The government now tries to decrease environmental impacts by general applications. Examples of these are carbon taxes and taxes on waste production. However, these are so general, and sometimes even tradable, that the effects are limited. By incorporating an LCA assessment process of individual companies, mainly production companies, the government can specifically fine the heavy impact industries while rewarding those specific companies that try to lower their impact. In this case, the government performs the LCA’s itself and specifically fines or rewards companies. This is a way of altering the market conditions and falls into the ‘setting up boundaries’ control of the government.

Finally, a more direct way is by letting governmental institutions pay themselves for LCA’s. This is direct because the government will spend money, or maybe other resources, immediately on institutions that make LCA’s. These institutions can use this extra resource to create more LCA’s and help the government in return to address specific issues in policies. In this way, the government controls the intensity of LCA’s itself.

As we have seen, there were a number of different approaches:

1. Collecting data and enforcing transparency in the private sector is a way of external control.
2. Threatening to fine companies that do not perform LCA’s is a way by which the government can indirectly drive organizations to reevaluate the life cycle of their products.
3. By using LCA’s as a monitoring tool and specifically fine or subsidies organizations, the government sets up general boundaries of what is possible and what not.
4. Lastly, by spending direct resources to increase the use of LCA’s in institutions the government can try to gain insight to create better policies and increase the awareness in the private sector.

The effectiveness of external control versus setting up boundary conditions and threatening with external control can be evaluated using Sabatier’s framework. The framework uses three factors to assess the implementation effectiveness of a policy or statutory objective. 

 

First, the tractability of the problem reflects on the social problem itself, apart from the difficulties of implementation of governmental programs. The assumption is that some problems are easier to deal with than others. The use of LCA’s is to create insight in environmental impact of specific products or processes. Increasing the use doesn’t exactly address a problem. Therefore, the objective of the policies is to increase the use of LCA’s. This is very complex, but the same in all the four approaches, so this factor does not contribute to see which approach is more effective. 

Second, the extent to which the statute coherently structures the implementation process. Here a statute constitutes the fundamental policy decision being implemented in that it indicates the problems being addressed and stipulates the objectives to be pursued. The structuration is probably the most effective in approach 4. By giving one clear objective to the institutions, increasing LCA’s, and providing them with resources to do so, the structuration of implementation will be most effective probably. Especially because these institutions have the knowledge already on how to do it. The second approach let private organizations do what they want, but here the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ demands LCA’s. The objective is clear, but the structure around it probably not. The private organizations don’t know how to implement it and don’t see anything other than an objective to increase the use of LCA’s. They would probably contact other institutions with the know how so this is a very indirect unstructured approach. In a similar way, by using the LCA’s as a monitoring tool the government performs the LCA’s but probably this will be done by hiring specialists. Practically, it is the same way a private organization would increase the use. In conclusion, we can say that in terms of structuration of the implementation, external control is effective and direct, threat of external control loses grip on the structuration of the implementation. 

The last factor addresses how the non-statutory variables affect implementation. This assumes that there are different processes which also affect implementation, outside of the basic legal structure of the statute itself. For example, continuous political support and continuous changes in socio-economic and technological conditions on the support from public, interest groups, and sovereigns. Continuous political support in the case of external control or not is very sensitive to change. Every political party has its own vision on this and can change policies more in the direction where it wants. I presume for example that liberal parties would like to keep external control to a minimum. In this case, it is very difficult to predict which approach will be more effective.