Collaborative Research: The Policy Geography of Environmental Risk

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Scholars of U.S. environmental policy have long recognized that subnational institutions can influence policy implementation, but there has been virtually no attention given to the specific role of sub-state pollution control agencies' regional offices in carrying out federal laws. This is a major oversight that may substantially affect our understanding of how political, economic, and administrative factors influence the government's management of environmental risks. In this project, the research team uses a new approach to examine how overlapping administrative, political, and environmental problem boundaries shape the distribution of policy outputs and outcomes. They term this approach policy geography, and argue that it can induce governance challenges in the form of delegation problems, coordination dilemmas, and inequitable policy delivery, each of which has important implications for the management of environmental risks. Using newly-collected, fine-grained institutional data, the team utilizes software ogf geographic informtion systems to map out each of the 50 state's regional office policy geography for implementation of both the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA) for 2002-2012. They then combine this information with facility-level data on policy outputs (government inspections and enforcement actions) and policy outcomes (compliance and pollution risks) to test theoretically informed hypotheses on political control, policy coordination, and environmental justice. These tests are conducted using hierarchical linear models to account for the nested structure of the data. The proposed research will benefit ongoing policy efforts to manage environmental risks. The results of this research will inform our understanding of the origins of environmental risk patterns, and enhance our capacity to evaluate policy prescriptions aimed at mitigating unfavorable or uneven risk levels across society. In this sense, the proposal speaks to the core tenants of NSF's mission to "promote the health, prosperity and welfare of its citizens." The risks presented to the public from pollution remain important and substantial. For example, over 150 million Americans currently live in areas that are not meeting air quality standards for at least one major air pollutan), and more than 40,000 bodies of water are deemed "impaired" for failing to meet their use requirements. The CAA and the CWA are the primary safeguards against risks from air and water pollution, and understanding their implementation is critical to assure the effectiveness and fairness of pollution control across society. By examining the effects of different institutional arrangements on policy outcomes, the research can identify opportunities for re-configurations that will yield improved environmental governance.