This chapter is in many ways a chapter that reaches interesting abstractions on the nature of power, rights, and of constitutionalism, all in the interests of environmental law. We began with a discussion on Tiebout, who argued that when people with the same preferences cluster together in communities, that competition between local authorities will, under certain restrictive conditions, lead to allocative efficiency. This implies a market in jurisdictions and in states competing in public goods and services. Van den Bergh’s model forecasts a 'bottom up federalisation', wherein the default assumption is that the best level of governance is at the most local level available, unless it is otherwise demonstrable that the particular environmental issue cannot be sufficiently resolved at that level of government. Another point that we addressed is the issue of centralisation, of whether all actors should be required to comply with a singular jurisdiction-wide regulatory requirement to prevent an environmental problem (centralisation), or, should they be allowed to individually discover their own most efficient method of preventing the environmental problem (decentralisation).

And to price an aspect of environmental services need not mean a direct 'price to acquire rights to injure' perspective, but rather can reflect the damages imposed on the community from the event of the injury, of the opportunity costs of the events around the environmental injury. Further, there can be a calculation of the costs necessary to completely avoid the events enabling the injury; at what cost can the commercial activity be undertaken in a manner that enables an environment to remain clear of injury. The Baumol-Oates approach, to determine a set of environmental quality standards to facilitate the imposition of marginal cost correcting unit taxes, enables a functional start at implementing a Pigouvian tax system. But no environmental system is simple, the approach will necessarily be limited to an incomplete set of externalities. Under most forms of cost-benefit analysis, the use of marginal costs for environmental losses requires an understanding of the marginal benefits of the activity that caused those injuries, if they are to be aligned for optimal community welfare. However, those costs and benefits may accrue to many diverse stakeholders, present and future, and it may be quite difficult to complete the set of information required to fully implement marginal analysis.