Chapter 6: Political Climate for Environmental Policies and Proposals for International Mechanism

Success in implementing various transport environment policies depends on a good balance between the political power of interest groups that stand to gain or lose from their implementation. In this section, some typical problems of implementing environmental policy in the transport sector are summarised.

Points such as these make the political solution of problems more complicated. It is not enough to develop standard solutions, more than that it is important to create individually tailored policy actions, which are adapted to the local conditions including the degree of political acceptance.

In what follows, some examples are given for such individual policy actions. Taking cases from Europe, the U.S. and Japan, it will be underlined that environmental strategies in the transport sector can be effective if they are adjusted to fit the particular situation in each country or region.