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Robert M. La Follette
School of Public Affairs
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706

Telephone: 608.262.3581
Fax: 608.265.3233

Last updated:
October 19, 2007

Wisconsin Style: New Approaches to Regulatory Innovation

Conference participants: Business and government CAN work together

In the business world, much of the drive to do well by the environment stems simply from a philosophy that doing so is a good practice, explained Wisconsin businessman Chris Carpenter of Royle Printing, whose Sun Prairie company has taken great strides to lessen its impact on the environment while maintaining a sound business strategy.

“As we become more environmentally conscious as a country and certainly as an industry, that starts to become a factor, and there are benefits. There’s hard benefits that are measurable and then there’s soft benefits. And sometimes I don’t think we think about the soft benefits enough,” Carpenter said. “All the things we need to do to become profitable and satisfy our customers’ needs also go towards a good environmental policy on our end in that we’ll use less paper, we’ll use less ink, which in the long run helps with sustainable development throughout our environment.”

Running a business and caring for the environment is the key, said Klaus Mittelbach, Ph.D., director of environmental policy with the Federation of German Industries. He noted that the issue of global warming, for instance, is not well-defined or proven, may yet have dire complications. Collective and mitigative efforts now will undoubtedly pay off in the long term.

Wisconsin Style: New Approaches to Regulatory Innovation

Environmental Law in a Connected World conference report

Mittelbach and Carpenter were two of the participants at the international Environmental Law in a Connected World conference organized by the La Follette School of Public Affairs on January 31, 2005.

“You have to find your individual solution to achieve sustainable development, whatever it means. It’s a very individual solution, and you can never take the solution you have taken as the only one and transport it to somewhere in the world. And this is what I think we have to understand. We have to find individual solutions,” Mittelbach explained. “We in Germany, in close cooperation with the German government, we decided to do something in that direction so that we will not be in a position to be surprised somewhere in the future when the problem (arises).”

Environmental regulation that is based on performance rather than minimal compliance is built on a transparent collaboration between government and business. While some people may be skeptical that business might be concerned with the environment, many in the business community worldwide are invested in environmental issues, said Mark McDermid, director of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ Cooperative Environmental Assistance bureau, which oversees Green Tier and the Environmental Cooperation Pilot Program. He also participated in the Environmental Law in a Connected World conference.

In fact, the commitment to improving the environment demands consideration of how to formalize the relationship of business and government via laws that spell out responsibilities and expectations, McDermid says. Green Tier accomplishes this in Wisconsin. At the same time, however, laws must establish the government as more of a moderator than a dictator to allow businesses to conduct themselves in an environmentally responsible way.

“We don’t have to agree on all of the details about how we solve the problem. We simply have to agree that there is a problem and tap the capacity— whether it’s in Bavaria or here in Madison—to contribute to the potential solution,” McDermid says. “The distinction is—and what we’ve learned from the Germans—that you need to have a legal foundation for doing that. You’ve got to have a way to effectively engage businesses so that they’re not relying on the next change of political office.”