Environmental Politics and Policy: A Comparative Approach (review)

Steel, Clinton and Lovrich have produced a compelling textbook aimed at undergraduate students (and lay citizens) who wish to learn more about the basics of environmental politics beyond the context of the United States. By focusing on comparative environmental politics, it fills an important niche in the textbook literature. It constitutes a good overview of environmental politics across the world, which is highly complex with many social, cultural, geographical, and economic variations that the authors note repeatedly. Generally, the text is pitched at the right level for students only beginning to learn about environmental politics. It uses numerous good examples, provides useful resources to follow up and, most importantly, can galvanize students to continue their work in the field.

Nonetheless, despite aiming to provide a comparative lens, Steel, Clinton and Lovrich do not provide a sufficiently strong introduction to comparative politics and methodology. They need to begin with a careful overview of the motivations for taking a comparative perspective, and the key policy, political, bureaucratic, and regulatory features that may be important (or not) in each country. They do not discuss critically the growing scholarship on comparative environmental politics. For instance, Vogel, O'Neill, and Brickman, Ilgen, and Jasanoff respectively have published key works looking at the US and the European Union. They point to key differences in regulatory philosophy, decision-making processes, citizen engagement, governance institutions, and administrative arrangements as underpinning differences in how environmental problems are identified, and policies are formulated and implemented. Yet these works are not referred to in the text, a serious omission.

Students need initial exposure to this scholarship if they are to be able to evaluate differences and similarities in environmental policy worldwide. They need an introduction to the tools and concepts of comparative analysis. The comparative angle, however, is grounded more in presenting a number of country or region case studies that summarize trends in environmental degradation, public attitudes, and national capacity—without also probing why there might be differences and what these differences might mean for environmental politics domestically and internationally. One exception is the outstanding chapter on the United States, which explains how comparative analysis can yield valuable insights into political culture and regulatory politics, using the presidential US and its parliamentary neighbor Canada as cases. This chapter makes the key point that US environmental policy has moved toward a greater voluntary and market-based stance. The authors acknowledge that the book is primarily aimed at an American market. Hence the book needs supplementation with further theoretical material.

It would be more effective to treat the European Union in a separate chapter, rather than being conflated under "post-industrial countries," and to analyze how its current environmental policy-making and regulatory approaches differ from other regions. The EU model has certain features that are extremely interesting to compare to those of the United States, yet this is not accomplished. EU contributions to innovative environmental policy-making are not sufficiently explored. For instance, the Removal of Hazardous Substances and the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directives—calling for the phase-out of several toxic substances in electronics and the take-back by manufacturers of certain products respectively—are among the most far-reaching environmental policies. Yet they are not mentioned, a serious absence even if finite space does not permit a full cataloguing of EU initiatives. Another worrisome gap is that Japan is surprisingly missing from the book as a whole, even though it diverges markedly in its environmental policies and political culture from other post-industrial countries on key aspects.

The book, however, has many helpful features that professors may find useful in teaching comparative environmental politics. Critically, there is heartfelt emphasis on the need to address human welfare problems in developing regions, and a call for post-industrial countries to recognize their obligations to enhance the capacity of developing countries. The authors contextualize the challenges of environmental policies in regions where poverty, poor governance, and lack of access to water and food are endemic. They...