Policy Design and the Acceptability of Environmental Risks: Nuclear Waste Disposal in Canada and the United States

This article examines the controversial process of developing high-level nuclear waste disposal policy in Canada, with some comparison to experience in the United States. It argues that a policy design perspective can assist in understanding the difficult social and political issues associated with waste disposal and the environmental and health risks that it poses. I examine several critical questions related to such an endeavor and link them to long-term goals of building a sustainable society. Success in formulating and implementing a nuclear waste policy in Canada will depend on the nation's capacity to create requisite processes of public participation. Particularly important are those actions that can help the public understand and assess environmental risks, including related ethical and social issues, and build public trust and confidence in the siting processes and the implementing agencies.     

Environmental Policy in India

This article reviews the significant changes India has achieved in environmental policy in the pool 10 years, especially in terms of regulatory procedures and organizational structure. Despite these changes, however, environmental quality has continued to deteriorate, largely because a wide gap persists between the intent of policy and the actual achievement and because major problems have eluded serious attention. The paper analyzes major problems in the implementation of Indian environmental policy, with particular attention to policy design, policy analysis, and standard setting. Political problems are identified that underlie difficulties in policy formulation and implemetation, and strategies to improve implemetation are proposed.     

Neo-Corporatism and Environmental Policy

The ecologically sustainable development (ESD) process represented a significant attempt by the Commonwealth Government to involve pro-environment and pro-development protagonists in a major environmental consultative forum. The government's inclusion of peak interest organisations into an exclusive consultation process resembles a neo-corporatist approach to interest intermediation. However, neo-corporatist theory has been applied almost exclusively to economic policy areas and interest organisations representing capital, labour and the state. Analysing the involvement of select environmental organisations in the ESD process, this paper argues that neo-corporatist theory can be extended to include non-production-based interest organisations. The implications of environmental organisation participation in a neo-corporatist structure are examined, including a discussion of the tension between neo-corporatist and new social movement theories.     

Influencing Environmental Policy in Rural Communities: The Environmental Opposition at Work

Environmental opposition groups have often formed in rural communities as a response to sweeping environmental regulations. They do not match the stereotypes of nongovernmental organizations funded by extractive resource industries, but have a solid grass-roots membership that is stalling, if not altogether thwarting, the momentum of the environmental movement.     

Latinos and Environmental Justice: Examining the Link between Degenerative Policy,Political Representation,and Environmental Policy Implementation

The theory of social construction and policy design is insightful for exploring the circumstances in which the allocation of policy benefits and burdens is attributed to the feed‐forward effect of degenerative policy that institutionalizes bias and reinforces the prevailing categorization and embedded social meaning regarding target populations. However, this theoretical framework has not been broadly adopted to analyze the environment‐related phenomena. With a nationwide, block‐group‐level sample, this study examines the extent to which degenerative policies pertaining to immigrants influence state agencies' environmental regulatory outputs for predominantly Latino communities. Results show that in the states with moderately to most restrictive immigrant policy and high levels of Latino representation in legislatures, the rigorousness of government agencies' compliance monitoring activities decreases for Latino neighborhoods of environmental justice concern, as states' policy stance toward immigrants becomes more unfavorable. More Latino elected officials do not bolster policy implementation efforts for the vulnerable communities or offset the backlash effect of immigrant policy.     

Community as a Policy Instrument: A Comparative Analysis

Over recent decades. "community" has been a powerful theme in social policy development not only in the United States but elsewhere in North America and Europe as well. Existing analyses of the concept, however, tended to approach it more from philosophical and sociological perspectives than from the standpoint of policy analysis. This article examines the uses of community as a policy instrument, considering its diverse applications us policy objective, policy means, and policy rhetoric. A cross-section of major community-oriented policies in the United States and Quebec is analyzed, providing a basis file policy-level, regime-level, and political culture comparison. Identifying the key components that community policies may incorporate, we propose a schema for systematically describing deferent types of interventions. Finally. we review the difficulties encountered in implementing policies with a community orientation and the need to avoid simplistic judgments of success and failure.     

The Politics of Greek Environmental Policy

This article serves a dual purpose. Its substantive goal is to provide an account of Greek environmental policy formation and implementation over the last twenty years. Its theoretical goal is to examine the relative impacts of specific political factors, as contrasted with aggregate levels of socioeconomic and institutional development, in shaping environmental policy in an industrializing country. such as Greece. More specifically, it is argued that certain aspects of state-society relations and of the internal organization of the Greek state are frequently the major reasons behind the country's difficulties in formulating implementable preventive policy and in implementing adequately constructed policy.     

Comparative Environmental Policy: Market-type Instruments in Industrialized Capitalist Countries

This paper examines experiences of five industrialized capitalist countries in using effluent charges, tradable permits, and subsidies as tools of environmental regulation and compares their programs to economists'models of the market approach. Observed disparity between theory and practice suggests that advantages of the market approach are not as significant as proponents contend. Reasons are identified, and differences in national characteristics of public administration are considered toward explaining differences in how countries have applied market instruments.     

Text as Policy: Measuring Policy Similarity through Bill Text Reuse

The identification of substantively similar policy proposals in legislation is important to scholars of public policy and legislative politics. Manual approaches are prohibitively costly in constructing datasets that accurately represent policymaking across policy domains, jurisdictions, or time. We propose the use of an algorithm that identifies similar sequences of text (i.e., text reuse), applied to legislative text, to measure the similarity of the policy proposals advanced by two bills. We study bills from U.S. state legislatures. We present three ground truth tests, applied to a corpus of 500,000 bills. First, we show that bills introduced by ideologically similar sponsors exhibit a high degree of text reuse, that bills classified by the National Conference of State Legislatures as covering the same policies exhibit a high degree of text reuse, and that rates of text reuse between states correlate with policy diffusion network ties between states. In an empirical application of our similarity measure, we find that Republican state legislators introduce legislation that is more similar to legislation introduced by Republicans in other states, than is legislation introduced by Democratic state legislators to legislation introduced by Democrats in other states.      

Evaluating the Environmental Effects of Agricultural Policy

The fact that agricultural policy decisions can have important environmental consequences has become common knowledge among policy scholars and policy practitioners. This relationship is reflected in the increasingly prominent soil conservation and environmental protection components of the 1985 and 1990 Farm Bills. In debating the value of continuing these provisions in the upcoming reauthorization of this legislation, scholars and politicians alike focus almost exclusively on their water quality benefits. However, the soil conservation components of agricultural policy also may affect air quality significantly. Using multivariate transfer function analysis, we find that implementation of the 1985 Farm Bill's Conservation Reserve Program has improved air quality significantly in that area of the country most plagued by agricultural air pollution.