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Private organizations have recently established numerous programs aimed at improving the environmental performance of industry. Many of the new programs seek to define and enforce standards for environmental management, and to make it difficult for producers not to participate in them. They claim, explicitly and implicitly, to promote the public interest. They take on functions generally performed by government regulatory programs, and may change or even displace such programs. Private environmental regulatory programs thus have the potential to significantly reshape domestic and international policy institutions by changing the locus, dynamics, and substance of policymaking. The expansion of private environmental regulation comes at a time of growing agreement that environmental goals must be integrated and pursued in tandem with social and economic ones. The primary source of this view is the …