this inefficient and wasteful, but it increasingly subordinates communities, regions and even nations to external forces. Throughout the capitalist world, therefore, alternatives to command and control have been proposed for sometimes diametrically opposite reasons, and the state has sometimes responded to both positive and negative pressures with the same programmes. A next generation of regulatory techniques has emerged, including self-regulation, coregulation, voluntary agreements, regulatory flexibility, negotiated agreements, environmental partnerships, informational regulation, and economic instruments. Many instances of these are expressions of a search for more positive forms of regulation that reward continual improvement, apply to specific situations better, and do it all in a least cost way. But sometimes aspects of the very same programmes are defensive concessions to a narrow budget-cutting bottom-line mentality that is starving governments of essential resources and undercutting the few remaining forms of commons left in industrial economies. Environmentalists have been justifiably concerned with an excessive preoccupation with flexibility and voluntary agreements that have had detrimental effects on communities and the environment. Many have insisted that the solution is the opposite: far more comprehensive and rigorous mandatory controls and direct government intervention. But there is another critique of command-andcontrol that takes a very different tack.