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"Fiorino, Daniel J"
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Sustainability as a Conceptual Focus for Public Administration
This article argues that sustainability should define the conceptual focus for the field of public administration in the coming decade. Sustainability involves three systems: environmental, economic, and political/social systems. The challenge of governance, and thus of public administration, is to sustain each of these systems on its own while maintaining an appropriate balance among them. The article defines the sustainability concept, and its environmental component in particular, in ways that are relevant to public administration; assesses the validity of the concept in terms of the interrelationships and interdependencies among the three systems; and suggests the implications for the field. By integrating knowledge and study of the environmental system with the traditional competence in the political/social and economic systems that is expected in the field, public administrators may achieve a more theoretically complete and empirically valid foundation for education, research, and practice.
Journal Article
Explaining national environmental performance: approaches, evidence, and implications
Since environmental problems rose to prominence in the last third of the twentieth century, they have been a major area of policy for national governments. A large body of research has explored the explanations for different levels of environmental policy performance among countries. This article begins with a discussion of approaches to measuring national performance before reviewing and assessing four categories of explanations in the literature, which may be summarized in four questions: (1) What are the relationships between economic growth and environmental protection? (2) Do democratic regimes have advantages over more authoritarian ones in adopting effective policies and reducing harm? (3) Do such institutional characteristics as pluralism or neo-corporatism and federalism affect a nation's ability to deal with environmental problems? (4) Are there institutional or societal capacities or relationships within or among nations that may explain policy success? By adopting a broad perspective on the literature on national environmental performance, the article is able to explore and compare the principal findings of these categories of research and assess the relationships among them.
Journal Article
Citizen Participation and Environmental Risk: A Survey of Institutional Mechanisms
Standard approaches to defining and evaluating environmental risk tend to reflect technocratic rather than democratic values. One consequence is that institutional mechanisms for achieving citizen participation in risk decisions rarely are studied or evaluated. This article presents a survey of five institutional mechanisms for allowing the lay public to influence environmental risk decisions: public hearings, initiatives, public surveys, negotiated rule making, and citizens review panels. It also defines democratic process criteria for assessing these and other participatory mechanisms.
Journal Article
Environmental Policy As Learning: A New View of an Old Landscape
Environmental policy in the United States has always been characterized by high levels of political conflict. At the same time, however, policy makers have shown a capacity to learn from their own and others' experience. This article examines U. S. environmental policy since 1970 as a learning process and, more specifically, as an effort to develop three kinds of capacities for policy learning. The first decade and a half may be seen in terms of technical learning, characterized by a high degree of technical and legal proficiency, but also narrow problem definitions, institutional fragmentation, and adversarial relations among actors. In the 1980s, growing recognition of deficiencies in technical learning led to a search for new goals, strategies, and policy instruments, in what may be termed conceptual learning. By the early 1990s, policy makers also recognized a need for a new set of capacities at social learning, reflecting trends in European environmental policy, international interest in the concept of sustainability, and dissatisfaction with the U. S. experience. Social learning stresses communication and interaction among actors. Most industrial nations, including the United States, are working to develop and integrate capacities for all three kinds of learning. Efforts to integrate capacities for conceptual and social learning in the United States have had mixed success, however, because the institutional and legal framework for environmental policy still is founded on technical learning.
Journal Article
STREAMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL INNOVATION: FOUR DECADES OF EPA POLICY REFORM
The dynamic and rapidly changing field of the environment presents many examples of policy innovation. These various efforts may be organized in streams of environmental policy innovation. Of the many such innovation streams undertaken by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in recent decades, fìve are examined and compared on the basis of the perceived deficiency that led to the policy change, their design and applications, the conceptual basis for the innovation, and the durability of the change. The five innovation streams are emissions trading, program integration, risk-based planning, regulatory and permitting fìexibility, and voluntary programs. Among the factors that may be associated with the more durable innovations are consensus on a need for change; demonstrable, nearterm gains in economic efficiency and environmental effectiveness, rather than in institutional capacity; and a strong theoretical and statutory foundation. The difficulty of meeting these conditions explains, at least in part, why innovation in environmental policy has been so challenging over the years.
Journal Article
The new environmental regulation
Environmental regulation in the United States has succeeded, to a certain extent, in solving the problems it was designed to address; air, water, and land, are indisputably cleaner and in better condition than they would be without the environmental controls put in place since 1970. But Daniel Fiorino argues in The New Environmental Regulation that -- given recent environmental, economic, and social changes -- it is time for a new, more effective model of environmental problem solving. Fiorino provides a comprehensive but concise overview of U.S. environmental regulation -- its history, its rationale, and its application- -- and offers recommendations for a more collaborative, flexible, and performance-based alternative. Traditional environmental regulation was based on the increasingly outdated assumption that environmental protection and business are irreversibly at odds. The new environmental regulation Fiorino describes is based on performance rather than on a narrow definition of compliance and uses such policy instruments as market incentives and performance measurement. It takes into consideration differences in the willingness and capabilities of different firms to meet their environmental obligations, and it encourages innovation by allowing regulated industries, especially the better performers, more flexibility in how they achieve environmental goals. Fiorino points to specific programs -- including the 33/50 Program, innovative permitting, and the use of covenants as environmental policy instruments in the Netherlands -- that have successfully pioneered these new strategies. By bringing together such a wide range of research and real world examples, Fiorino has created an invaluable resource for practitioners and scholars and an engaging text for environmental policy courses.
eBook
MATCHING SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS: STRATEGIES FOR NANOTECHNOLOGY OVERSIGHT
An effective strategy for exercising responsible oversight of a new and rapidly evolving challenge such as nanotechnology will require a combination of regulatory and more voluntary approaches. Much of the current system for environmental regulation is designed for large pollution sources and high-volume production of chemicals, and it is not well suited on its own to the characteristics of nanotechnologies and their effects. Two recent voluntary programs—the Nano Risk Framework and the Nanomaterials Stewardship Program—illustrate both the strengths and limitations of voluntary programs. Hard law (regulatory programs) and soft law (relatively voluntary programs) both offer advantages as policy strategies for nanotechnology oversight. The challenge for policy makers is to understand how best to combine them into an effective, long-term oversight strategy.
Journal Article