Canadian environmental policy and technology change: Air pollution and the automobile

The causal relationship between technology and public policy is usually understood to be that policy shapes technological systems. Thus, existing research on the relationship between environmental policy and technology change has tended to argue that policy influences technology. Furthermore, existing conceptual models of the innovation-regulation relationship tend to be prescriptively oriented and/or focus at the fun-level despite the fact that industry and policy sector-specific factors have been found to play a significant role in the regulation-technological change relationship.;The central argument of this dissertation is that technology's influence on policy can be significant and deserves further attention. This work contributes to the policy literature by providing a better understanding of the reciprocal relationships in which policy is involved. Major findings include evidence indicating that technology was in fact influencing policy in this case. This study also found that the weakness of the state and the strength of industry increased opportunities for technology to influence policy-making. A third finding was that policy complexity, both jurisdictional and technical, extended the influence of technology on policy. In addition, when multiple industry sectors of economic significance are involved in a single issue area and when they act as unitary actors, inter-industry relations can play a more significant role in the influence of technology on policy than state-industry relations. Finally, interactions and interdependencies within and between policy and technology networks can increase the influence of technology upon policy. As a result, technology's influence on policy can begin to be systematically examined as a function of these factors and through the use of the policy network and sectoral innovation system analytical frameworks.;This dissertation examines how the nature of the policy issue area, the technology, the state, and industry work to increase technological influence on policy, specifically environmental regulatory policy in the case of automotive tailpipe air pollutant emissions. To build on existing work and allow for more systematic analysis of the means through which technology influences regulation, the systems of innovation approach to innovation analysis and the policy communities approach to policy analysis were used to empirically test the influence of technology on regulation.