Environmental Governance: A Report on the Next Generation of Environmental Policy

Chapter Five: The Civic Sustainability of Reform

Pervasive mistrust and disagreement face anyone aspiring to reform environmental policy. Environmentalists disparage the credibility of self-interested “polluters,” and businesses despair of satisfying the environmentalists’ demands, which they often perceive as profoundly unreasonable. Everyone is suspicious of environmental agencies, and the agencies themselves often display tension across the state-federal divide. Many critics say that environmental policymaking is insufficiently democratic. “Enhancing stakeholder participation” is a reform mantra, but there is no reason to believe that simply bringing more players into the game will, by itself, yield environmental choices that are more palatable or more cost effective. There is no guarantee that even earnest efforts to make the game more accessible will be successful. If the effort fails, or seems insufficient, enhanced cynicism and mistrust might easily result. But even a highly participatory process that extracts “consensus” through logrolling and vague statements of aspiration may only replicate the evasive imprecision common in legislation.1 Mistrust affects every level of environmental policymaking. Its historical roots antedate the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the enactment of the landmark laws the agency enforces. Indeed, the modern environmental movement arose in the 1960s on a foundation of mistrust. Environmental enthusiasts of the late 1960s believed the system they faced was systematically rigged, by nar146 chapter five The Civic Sustainability of Reform Christopher H. Foreman Jr. row material interests and short-run thinking, against the public interest cause they championed. By 1980 environmental awareness was firmly embedded as a public value.2 Since then, developments in American politics have complicated the problem of mistrust and disagreement. Moreover , the early struggle to raise public consciousness and enact fundamental legislation has long since given way to a contentious era of policy implementation on many fronts. The nature of the environmental threat was once the main source of angst, but today environmental programs are a source of controversy. Do these programs work well or poorly? Should they be reformed, and if so in what way? The more we try to do, the more programmatic pitfalls stimulate argument and disappointment. This chapter first reviews developments in the past two decades that have created such a challenging political context for would-be reformers . The discussion then moves to whether and how citizens can be more effectively and productively included in environmental initiatives, thereby directly addressing one of the primary anxieties about reinvention (beyond the simple fear that it may allow more pollution). Can reinvention be rendered democratically legitimate and substantively effective? What can environmentalists tell us that might conceivably help propel reinvention, despite the strong reservations many environmental advocates have about it? The Managerial Model and Its Limits During a recent conference on environmental reinvention, one participant briefly addressed the American political system’s obsession with accommodating new categories of stakeholders in policy processes. The moment passed quickly, but the question raised is worth reviving: What’s ironic is the shift in the way that some of our programs have gone, where you need a stakeholder process to assure the public interest. I mean, I lost something somewhere along the way. I . . . thought that’s . . . why we elected members of Congress and . . . people [to] various offices around the country, and . . . why Congress then delegated some authority to act on the public’s behalf through executive agencies.3 As the commentator was doubtless aware, support for this “textbook ” managerial model of policymaking began evaporating a long civic sustainability of reform 147 time ago.4 In the 1960s public interest advocates were actively rejecting the notion that the demands and needs of citizens flowed neatly into a legislative process and thereafter into implementation by politically neutral agency experts.5 The regularly superior political position of business interests in traditional economic regulation helped to make environmental activists unwilling to trust in such processes to defend the ecology and the public health. Only an ever-vigilant and energized citizenry could keep regulators dutiful and business power (that is, “polluter” power) at bay. One profound result was the passage of statutes enabling citizens to bring environmental lawsuits. Environmental activists believed that such provisions would bolster the stringency of regulation. As R. Shep Melnick has observed, “Previous statutes had required citizens wishing to sue administrators to show that they had suffered direct, concrete harm at the hands of an agency. Almost all the regulatory laws passed in the 1970s, though, authorized ‘any citizen’ to file suit against administrators either...