Environmental Policy and Sustainable Development

With changing and mounting pressures on environmental resources due to economic and demographic developments, environmental policymaking is a wide and continuously growing field. The birth hour of modern environmental policymaking is the 1950s and 1960s, with the United States (US) as a pioneer country in adopting the first instruments for resource protection and combating pollution (Andrews 2006). Around the same time, environmental movements became visible in terms of mobilization and organization (Ruckelshaus 1985), although the origins and philosophical foundations of such movements date back to the fifteenth century (Kline 2011). Similarly, environmental economics, as one of the main instruments of environmental policy analysis, was acknowledged as a scientific field during the 1960s, although the economic analysis of environmental problems had been under way for at least two centuries before (Sandmo 2015).