Several approaches to pollution reduction problem solving were published in about 40 years of history of environmental economics. Some of them serve as a theoretical basis for creation of systems of practical environmental policies. In 90-ties a new trend in environmental policies seems to be growing up. It is a voluntary participation of businesses (as one of the most important polluters) in the pollution problem solving. So-called environmental management system principles and standards are being developed and certified in many counties. There is a reasonable number of corporations who already have introduced this system into their management system. First voluntary agreements between industry and authorities have occurred which brings sometimes significant benefits to both sides.

The paper wants to contribute to a development of such theories and approaches that could promote a further progress in this field. It tries to describe a relatively new approach to pollution reduction problem solving — a model of negotiation between polluters and authorities as it is being developed at the Department of Environmental Economics, University of Economics Prague and to discuss some ideas of fields of practical applications of the suggested approach.

The described approach is not a "classical" model with a fixed structure but it is divided into two branches of variants. These two branches differ in the authority’s possibility to receive a credible information about microeconomics consequences of corresponding solution(s) of single polluters.

The first case (branch of approaches) is the situation when the authority does have such information available for its decision making. The second branch (more interesting and closer to practice) is represented by those kinds of solutions where such information is available only for subjects-polluters but they are able to use it for their decision making in the process of negotiation with an authority. Several economic instruments of environmental policy are used in this process.