Environmental Policy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Environmental policy encompasses a wide range of governmental actions that deal with environmental quality or the use of natural resources. It includes the traditional focus on the conservation or efficient use of natural resources such as public lands and waters, wilder ness, and wildlife. Since the 1960s, both in the United States and in other developed nations, it also has included the environmental protection efforts of government, such as air and water pollution control to protect public health. Defined more broadly, environmental policy may include government action at any level, from local to international, that affects energy use, transportation, the design of cities and buildings, agriculture, human population growth, and the protection of the earth’s ecological, chemical, and geophysical systems.

Whether defined narrowly or broadly, these government policy actions represent society’s collective decision to pursue certain environmental goals or objectives and to use particular tools (such as regulation or financial incentives) to achieve them. Increasingly, environmental policy extends beyond national policies and has included the establishment of major international accords that seek to protect the earth’s ozone layer, limit trans boundary movement of toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes, conserve biological diversity, and reduce the risks of global climate change, among other goals. Regional environmental accords also are increasingly common, most notably and successfully in the European Union, which generally has adopted tougher requirements than those found in the United States.

Sometimes governments choose not to adopt formal policies and thus implicitly leave many or most decisions about certain environmental and resource problems (e.g., the level of energy use) to individuals, corporations, and the operations of the free market. Such decisions may be made because policy makers are not convinced that government involvement is needed or legitimate or because the level of controversy over proposals makes agreement impossible. Hence, governments find it easier to do nothing in the short term, an outcome that is common in the international arena when nations cannot come to an agreement on what to do in light of their often-divergent national interests. Governments also may choose to adopt environmental policies that rely heavily on market-based approaches and thus minimize direct regulation of the target activity while maintaining market competition and a minimal government role. For example, so-called cap-and-trade programs are a central component of proposed climate change policies that leave far more discretion to industry than would direct regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Evolution Of Environmental Policy And Politics

The problems that environmental policies are intended to address have changed substantially over time, as have the set of policy approaches and tools that governments have relied on and the political and institutional context in which policy making and implementation take place. Many students of environmental policy recognize at least three generations of public policies, and some see this evolution as a fundamental shift from one policy epoch to another. During the 1970s, for example, the problems were defined largely as air and water pollution and later toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes. The preferred solution in the United States was federally driven regulation of industry through what became known as command-and-control policies, in which the federal government and the states set environmental quality standards and enforced them as provided in the laws. These kinds of policies, such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, achieved many of their objectives over time, but they could not fully deal with the problems. Costs were high, and noncompliance with policy mandates was not unusual. Moreover, the policies as designed could not handle newer problems such as nonpoint sources of pollution (e.g., runoff from agricultural land and urban surfaces) where regulation was impractical. Those were important weaknesses.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, policy scholars and policy makers defined the problems somewhat differently and offered ideas for reform both in pollution control and in natural resources policies. They emphasized the promotion of efficiency and effectiveness through regulatory flexibility, greater cooperation between government and industry, and the use of new policy approaches such as market incentives. Especially in the United States, they also tended to favor devolution of policy responsibilities from the federal government to the states and greater collaboration among stakeholders. Controversy has swirled around many of these proposals from the second generation of environmental policy, in part because environmentalists often saw them as a rolling back of environmental policy goals while representatives from business and some state and local governments argued they did not go far enough to grant them the flexibility they sought to improve environmental performance. Reform of the major statutes from the 1970s also proved difficult because of deep partisan divisions over the issues.

By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a third generation or era in environmental policy began, with strong roots in the concept of sustainability. It did not replace the first two eras so much as it built on the foundations that they laid and incorporated new ways of thinking about environmental problems, policy goals, and the best means for achieving them. For example, from this perspective much value is placed on comprehensive and integrated analysis of the way in which human activities affect natural systems and, in turn, how society depends on the healthy functioning of such systems, such as purification of air and water or the stabilization of climate. It is in this period that scholars and policy makers began to see that environmental problems had to be considered in relation to population growth, energy use, land use, transportation patterns, the design of cities, agriculture and water use, and many other practices.

In addition, a global rather than merely local, regional, or national perspective emerged as a key element in this view of environmental policy. Global problems such as loss of biodiversity, population growth, climate change, and growing water scarcity emerged at international meetings from the 1970s to the 2000s and helped to build a new policy agenda for the twenty-first century. The most visible signpost of the new outlook was the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and its legacy is apparent in the approved plan of action, Agenda 21. This broad commitment to sustainable development continued at a follow-up meeting, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002. That meeting drew new attention to the need to improve social and economic conditions in the world’s poorest countries while also fostering economic growth and environmental protection, as reflected in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals adopted two years before the meeting. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change, adopted in 1997 and set to expire in 2012 and be replaced by a newly negotiated treaty, is a leading example of these trends in global environmental policy.

New Directions In Studying Environmental Policy

The implications of this shift to sustainability or sustainable development, and to international action on global environmental problems, are profound. They range from the redesign of industrial processes to the promotion of sustainable use of natural resources such as energy. Successful policies are likely to require new kinds of knowledge and new methods of analysis as well as an unprecedented level of cooperation among nations. Political science research already is beginning to reflect interest in sustainability as a concept and the value of the comparative and international study of environmental policy and politics. There is also greater recognition of the importance of interdisciplinary analysis to capture the full range of variables that can affect environmental policy adoption, implementation, and impact at all levels of government.

Other articles in this encyclopedia discuss far more than is possible here, including the use of particular frameworks, theories, and models in political science research. Suffice it to say that scholars in political science and related disciplines employ a rich diversity of approaches in their study of environmental policy and politics.

Bibliography:

Axelrod, Regina S., David Leonard Downie, and Norman J.Vig, eds. The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2005.
Eisner, Marc Alan. Governing the Environment: The Transformation of Environmental Regulation. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2007.
Harrison, Kathryn, and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, eds. Global Commons and National Interests: The Comparative Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010.
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O’Neill, Kate. The Environment and International Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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Vig, Norman J., and Michael E. Kraft, eds. Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-first Century. 7th ed.Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010.