Bringing economic opportunity into line with environmental influence: A discussion on the Coase theorem and the Porter and van der Linde hypothesis

Environmental concerns and tightened environmental policy parameters have been associated with the notion of additional costs of compliance rather than with innovation and sustainability. The contrary, has also been suggested, claiming that strict environmental legislation merely serves as a catalyst for firms to retain obvious economic and environmental mutual gains–so called win–wins–laying around waiting to be collected. Such implications can be seen from the Porter and van der Linde writings, heavily criticised by Palmer et al. as being built on faulty examples. This paper supports that conclusion and uses property rights and transactions costs theories to find private incentives to explore the win–wins for those actors who have the largest potentials to diminish the pressure on our environment. By applying the Coase theorem, emphasising transaction costs and property rights, this paper argues that strong public support is needed to create private incentives for exploring economic and environmental win–win innovations. The public support suggested is to (A) extend producer responsibilities–where the same costs which may be neglected by the end consumers will, if transferred to the design owner, be viewed as a production cost–and to (B) enforce environmental public procurement. Both may be combined with a support to (C) actors (such as non-governmental organisations and consumer agencies) positioning themselves as information bridges by informing the consumers. The negative effects of asymmetric information among actors can, thereby, be diminished as well as the low interest to primarily care for the environment among common consumers.