Agreements and Audits -The Finnish way

Finland has placed a lot of its energy policy ambitions into making voluntary agreements  that cover a broad range of sectors of the Finnish Industry.

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The process is driven by the audit upon which a certain amount of eligible measures have to be undertaken, some of them with government support. An evaluation shows that the results are considerable, but has also required quite a bit of subsidies.

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All this is based on a huge work in a EU-project on audits that also produced a very useful (but thick, 348 pages) handbook

A recent report from DEFRA in UK verifies that voluntary agreements work but requires both the carrot and the stick. It however also states that the empirical evidence is quite scarce.