Causes of climate change and potentials to realize energy savings are known, but insight into underlying learning, organisational, and behavioural processes affecting the application of these innovative potentials is lagging behind. There is a challenge to open the black box of environmental innovation. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, we pursue a better understanding of the interaction of an industry with the government, and second a better understanding of the structuring of the underlying learning processes for environmental innovation and the interactions within these learning processes. This thesis focuses on the Dutch paper and board industry because of its highly energy intensive process of paper and board production and other environmental topics, namely waste water and waste, related to the production process of paper and board. Over the last decades different (types of) policy instruments have been implemented. There has been an accumulation of policy instruments. In the first empirical chapter we study the (relative) role of an industry association in the policy-making processes of these different policy instruments. The results show that the role is clearly different in policy-making processes of distinct types. In the case of interactive regulation the involvement of the industry is largest and smallest in the case of top-down regulation. In Chapter 4 we investigate these same sets of instruments to gain more insight into the way accumulation of policy measures affects research activities and eco-efficiency. These results show that in general an increase in policy pressure results in an improvement of eco-efficiency, with or without a time-lag. To obtain more insight into the effect of individual policy instruments we shift in Chapter 5 towards an agency perspective and study the adoption of CHP-installations. The results show that for paper and board factories environmental policies are relevant, yet it is only one of the influencing factors. The most important reason appeared to be the ...