This book has grown out of a research project commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Environmental Affairs in 1994. The brief of the project was to form a survey database of citizens' responses to environmental collective action problems, in order to report on the effectiveness of ‘self-regulation policy’ in the environmental policy plans of the Netherlands. This type of policy, which exists to the present day, seeks to regulate behaviour in areas of everyday life such as waste collection, private car travel, or economizing on household energy, by obtaining voluntary compliance to environmental goals of reducing pollution, rather than securing compliance through legal compulsion or financial incentives.

Self-regulation policies depend on the challenging notion that government can persuade citizens to overcome environmental dilemmas of the kind that the standard logic of collective action for large groups of rational individuals predicts will arise inevitably. Voluntary cooperation to reduce pollution would thus be ruled out on that logic, unless citizens could be made to act irrationally.

To respond to this challenge, our research design aims to combine theoretical insights into motives and preferences underlying rational choice in environmental dilemmas with empirical methods of survey research, in a way appropriate to assessing the chances and limits of self-regulation policies. In the course of writing the book, and in discussion with numerous colleagues, we have been aware that the results generated within our theoretical perspective on rational choice need to be interpreted with some care.