Voluntary agreements on energy efficiency in industry — not a golden key, but another contribution to improve climate policy mixes

The paper summarises the findings and the work carried out within the Voluntary Agreements — Implementation and Efficiency project and examines five agreement schemes in the field of industrial energy efficiency in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, France and Sweden. It provides a brief characterisation of the different approaches and discusses the related implementation effort and transaction costs. An assessment of performance and environmental effectiveness is given, followed by a discussion of the transferability of voluntary agreements among countries and to the European level.