Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication Page -- CONTENTS -- List of Illustrations -- List of Maps -- List of Acronyms -- 1 The Challenges of Shared Sovereignty -- Policy in a Federal System -- The Environment and Institutional Barriers -- The Wickedness of Climate Change -- Plan of the Book -- 2 A Brief History of Environmental Federalism -- Foundations (1776 to 1929) -- New Deal, New Era (1929 to 1980) -- New Federalism, New Power Dynamics (1980 to 2000) -- Bush and Beyond (2000 to 2019) -- 3 The Politics of Environmental Protection -- Political Incentives -- Public Opinion -- Environmental Advocacy and Interest Groups -- Comparative Policy -- Political Incentives Index -- 4 Administrative Challenges and the Limits of Environmental Policy in Practice -- Administrative Capacities -- Policymaking -- Managing Information -- Creating Accountability -- Administrative Capacity Index -- 5 Progressives, Strugglers, Delayers, and Regressives -- A Typology of States -- Explaining Patterns of Pollution -- Are Political Incentives and Administrative Capacity Independent? -- A Brief Thought Experiment -- 6 An Uneasy Partnership -- State as Aggressor, Part I -- State as Aggressor, Part II -- State as Cooperator -- State as Upholder of the Status Quo -- Inherent Conflicts of National-State Cooperation -- 7 The Tangled Web of Local Government -- The Rise of Local Environmental Policy -- State Domination, Local Compliance Management -- State Collaboration, Local Partners -- State Status Quos, Community Political Feasibility -- State Retreat, Local Struggles -- Making Sense of the State-Local Dimension -- 8 Same Story, Different Problem -- Explaining Patterns of GHG Emissions -- Explaining Patterns of State Climate Policy -- Intergovernmental Relations in the Climate Era -- Another Brief Thought Experiment.

In Environmental Federalism, Luke Fowler helps to refocus much-needed attention on the role of state governments in environmental policy creation and implementation in the United States. While the national government receives most of the attention when it comes to environmental policy, state governments play a vital role in protecting our natural resources. Legacy problems, like air, water, and land pollution, present one set of challenges for environmental federalism, but new problems emerging as a result of climate change further test the bounds of federal institutions. Examining patterns of pollution and case studies from the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, Fowler explores two questions: has environmental federalism worked in managing legacy environmental problems, and can it work to manage climate change? In order to answer these questions, Fowler extends James Lester's typology using political incentives and administrative capacities to identify four types of states (progressive, delayers, strugglers, and regressives) and assesses how they are linked to the success of federal environmental programs and conf licts in intergovernmental relations. He then considers what lessons we can learn from these programs and whether those lessons can help us better understand climate policy and multi-level institutions for environmental governance. This timely read will be a valuable contribution to students, researchers, and scholars of political science, public policy, public administration, and environmental studies.

Abstract
Ambiguity is often a double-edged sword that provides opportunity to further a democratic agenda in the face of institutional barriers, but with that comes a more complicated and unclear causal pathway that connects citizens to decisions that impact public goods and services. Does ambiguity enhance or hinder the ability of public servants to represent the wants and needs of citizens during the course of designing, developing, and implementing public service programs? The authors examine this at the institutional, organizational, and individual levels to understand its cascading impacts across the complex pathways that connect citizens to the sources of power and decision-making in democratic societies. Conclusions indicate that there are both normative and practical trade-offs created by ambiguity at each level, and the question of whether ambiguity enhances or hinders democratic governance comes down to how representation is balanced against coherence and consistency.

AbstractAre there any environmentalists left in the Republican Party? Using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and data from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) for the 115th (2017–2018) and 116th (2019–2020) Congresses, the author finds that around 25% of Republicans in the House of Representatives and 40% of those in the Senate are more supportive of environmental legislation than the average Democrat in their respective chambers, when separating partisanship from environmentalism. However, findings also suggest that environmentalism for Republicans tends to focus far more on conserving existing programs and resources than it does on advocating for progressive new policies to address emerging problems, like climate change, so it manifests differently than environmentally focused initiatives that are synonymous with the policy doctrine of Democrats.Related ArticlesDunning, Kelly Heber. 2021. "Unlikely Conservation Policy Making in a Polarized Congress: A Multiple Streams Analysis of 'America's Most Successful Conservation Program'." Politics & Policy 50(1): 93–118. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12448.Gershtenson, Joseph, Brian W. Smith, and William R. Mangun. 2006. "Friends of the Earth? Partisanship, Party Control of Congress, and Environmental Legislation in Congress." Politics & Policy 34(1): 66–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2006.00004.x.Wink, Kenneth A., and Andrew Bargen. 2008. "The Consolidation of the White Southern Congressional Vote: The Roles of Ideology and Party Identification." Politics & Policy 36(3): 376–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00113.x.

AbstractAmbiguities often weave through policies, leading to conflict and confusion over the intents and purpose of said policy and how it may manifest in any specific instance. Given that policy management is a core function for most public service agencies, the challenges here are almost universally experienced as public servants balance the political, legal, and technical requirements of policies against their functionality in practice. To this end, the authors use a grounded theory approach to identify themes in how practitioners cope with policy ambiguities. Relying on data from program evaluation reports and interviews with practitioners, the authors triangulate five themes: interpretation as a collaborative endeavor, teach people how to think, processes simplify and guide, consistency comes from horizontal communication, and policy interpretation evolve. Conclusions argue that ambiguity is a key theoretical and practical challenge that impacts the quality and character of democratic governance.

Partnerships receive significant attention in public administration scholarship, with the mass of this literature focusing on whether partnerships work, how to make them work, or how they fit into existing institutions (Provan and Milward, 2001; Vigoda, 2002; McGuire, 2006; Thomson and Perry, 2006; Andrews and Entwistle, 2010; McQuaid, 2010; O'Toole, 2015). Although partnership has been used variously by different scholars, in general, partnerships refer to formal arrangements between two or more organizations that are characterized by defined responsibilities, obligations, and/or governance structure, as compared to other forms of cooperative behaviors which may be more informal, unorganized, or involve few obligations. In general, existing scholarship on partnership formation argues that partnerships are a function of resource-exchanges, available partners, or fragmented authorities, and assumes a pragmatic managerial approach to these arrangements (Grady and Chen, 2006; Feiock and Scholz, 2009). However, scholarship is limited in linking these mechanisms together and explaining how organizations go from isolated and autonomous to integrated and interdependent. As such, it is difficult to determine how initial decisions in the partnership process eventually lead to success or failure in collaboration. Furthermore, much of this scholarship is written with a solely academic audience in mind, making difficult for practitioners, non-academics, or non-subject area experts to consume. To remedy this, we use Cohen, March, and Olsen's (1972) Garbage Can Theory (GCT) of organizational choice as a guiding framework to identify key issues that affect partnerships formation and tie this disjointed set of literature together. We then synthesize these issues into three key questions that can be operationalized by practitioners: 1) is there a problem that cannot be managed unilaterally?; 2) what new capacities are needed?; and 3) what partnership opportunities are there? From this perspective, forming partnerships unfolds in organized anarchies, where decision-makers must sort through ambiguous problems, solutions, and participants in order to determine if partnership is the right choice for their organization. In general, the purpose of this discussion is to identify and examine key issues that likely affect partnership choices made by practitioners and that can provide guidance to those who are considering engaging in collaboration or partnership. Finally, we discuss links between partnership formation and broader understandings of collaborations and networks.

AbstractThe author examines policy implementation as an exercise in coping with ambiguity (i.e., different ways of thinking about the same issues) on the one hand and uncertainty (i.e., lack of information) on the other. Functions are how implementers figure out the best way to make a policy work in practice and processes are how organizations formalize mechanisms that make behaviours more predictable. Using programme evaluation data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a mixed methods approach, findings identify specific implementation activities associated with both functions and processes and, while intertwined, these represent two distinct aspects of operationalizing policies. Conclusions suggest guidance on how to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty in practice, and connect functional and policy capacities to key avenues of public policy and administration scholarship.

The author furthers research on the multiple streams framework (MSF) by testing hypotheses related to the conditional nature of politics, policy, and problems streams in affecting policy outputs from both policymaking and policy implementation. The author articulates a theoretical model of the policy process where policymaking and policy implementation are separate, but interdependent processes, and generates three hypotheses related to policymaking, policy implementation, and the interdependence of those processes. Then, the author tests hypotheses with state‐level implementation of federal environmental policy over a 20 year period. Using seemingly unrelated regression (SUR), the author makes joint estimations of policymaking and policy implementation as separate, correlated processes. Findings indicate how politics affects policymaking and policy implementation is conditional on existing policies and problems, and that these two processes are not independent from each other. Conclusions connect this MSF to the broader literature and how it may address current criticisms.

AbstractIn managing complex policy problems in the federal system, state and local governments are organized into different arrangements for translating policy goals into policy outcomes. Air quality management is used as a test case to understand these variations and their impact on policy outcomes. With data from Clean Air Act implementation plans and a survey of state and local air quality managers, five separate institutional designs are identified: (1) central agencies; (2) top‐down; (3) donor–recipient; (4) regional agencies; and (5) emergent governance. Findings indicate that some arrangements (donor–recipient and emergent governance) result in notably better air quality than others (central agencies, top‐down). Specifically, when designed to allow bargaining between state and local officials, intergovernmental management is still the most effective approach to complex policy problems; but, in absence of this, conventional federalism arrangements are less effective than public agencies self‐organizing around shared policy goals.

Partnerships are now essential to public service delivery. However, due to the limitations in collaborative capacity, there are both obstacles and motivators for forming partnerships. Intergovernmental and cross‐sectoral partnerships offer different advantages and disadvantages in extending public service missions in new directions. Using survey data of local air quality agencies, findings determine different factors contribute to partnership and nonpartnership. Further findings suggest partnerships are driven largely by problem severity, but nonpartnership is driven by specific benefits and risks associated with types of partners. Conclusions indicate that understanding nonpartnership is a key to understanding partnership formation.Related ArticlesBurau, Viola, and Carole Clavier. 2018. "Understanding Gaps in the Coexistence between Different Modes of Governance: A Case Study of Public Health in Schools in a Multilevel System." Politics & Policy 46 (4): 604‐629. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12269Graizbord, Boris, and Jose Luis Gonzalez Granillo. 2019. "Urban Growth and Environmental Concerns: The Venture of the Greater Mexico City Metropolitan Area." Politics & Policy 47 (1): 178‐206. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12292Porto, Edoardo D., and Sonia Paty. 2018. "Cooperation among Local Governments to Deliver Public Services." Politics & Policy 46 (5): 790‐820. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12275
Related Media
DeGood, Kevin. 2018. "When Public‐Private Partnerships Fail: A Look at Southern Indiana's I‐69 Project." https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2018/02/15/446720/public-private-partnerships-fail-look-southern-indianas-69-project/Fowler, Luke, and Bryant Jones. 2018. "Local Governments and Air Quality Where You Are." https://thebluereview.org/local-governments-air-quality/

We apply Kingdon's multiple streams framework (MSF) to policy implementation to reflect a nested process separate from but interdependent with policymaking. Then, we generate a hypothesis concerning the conditional nature of problems, policies, and politics stream impacts on policy implementation. We test our hypotheses with state‐level implementation of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, using a pooled data set of 10 years of toxic releases data. Findings suggest an important interaction occurs among problems, policies, and politics during the policy implementation process. More specifically, when any of the three is held at median levels, only marginal differences in outputs occur; however, when all three are increased to extreme levels, substantive differences emerge. Conclusions connect policy implementation to larger issues of MSF theoretical development and suggest implications for governance.

Although energy has become a key political issue in recent decades, a comprehensive national policy is lacking, and state and local governments are playing increasingly important and diverse roles. This essay reviews what we know about intergovernmental relations in energy policy, including overlaps between national, state, and local authorities; the character of intergovernmental interactions; and interstate variations. In sum, this essay illustrates why intergovernmental issues in energy policies are an interesting and important area of inquiry, reviews current scholarship in key areas, and suggests possible future avenues for research on this topic.

Interjurisdictional policy problems have facilitated both interlocal cooperation and opportunities for self-interested behavior from local governments. However, intergovernmental management (IGM) approaches shape how local governments interact with each other and how much influence local managerial efforts have on policy outcomes. After identifying three IGM models used to manage air quality, analyses of local managerial perceptions indicate that some approaches facilitate more cooperation and organizational efficacy than others through structuring responsibilities in Clean Air Act policy implementation. Conclusions suggest that approaches to IGM are important in shaping how managers perceive efforts to manage complex policy problems.