Daniel A. Mazmanian

Liberalism, Environmentalism, and Partisanship in Public Policy-Making: The California Coastal Commissions

This article examines the effects of partisanship, liberalism, environmental concern, and issue salience on both the general policy preferences and the actual voting behavior of administrative officials in a state agency concerned with land use and natural resources management. Building upon earlier studies of interest groups and legislative bodies, this analysis of the members of the California Coastal Commissions suggests several refinements in current thinking about the relation of environmental concern to traditional ideological and partisan cleavages. First, while our findings confirm the association found in most previous elite studies between liberalism and support for protection of natural resources, they also indicate that it is only two of the three components of liberalism that are relevant-government regulation of the market and local government autonomy as opposed to attitudes toward the welfare state. Second, party identification proves of minimal value in explaining the policy preferences and actual behavior of administrative officials.

California's Climate Change Policy The Case of a Subnational State Actor Tackling a Global Challenge

For all its economic capacity, population size, and resource base, California remains only one among the 50 United States and, essentially, is a subnational actor attempting to play a role in the climate change policy arena on par with the nation-states of the world. This raises a series of questions about the substance and breadth of the states new policy and what has motivated it. The states policy declarations and initial flurry of activities are impressive. As with all so broad and sweeping initiatives, it remains to be seen the extent to which policy goals can and will be translated into operational rules and regulations, incentives and sanctions, and actual accomplishments across all the sectors of the states economy over the course of not just months and years but the decades to come.

The Three Epochs of the Environmental Movement

As the basis for exploring the sustainability movement in a variety of environmental arenas and places across the United States, Mazmanian and Kraft develop in this opening chapter of their book a framework that locates sustainability - historically and conceptually - as the third epoch in the modern environmental movement. Following on the regulatory and market-based epochs, sustainability can best be understood as an effort to address in a more comprehensive manner the interdependence of natural and human systems, and address the threat to the former by the latter. The three epochs are compared along a series of dimensions for problem identification, implementation philosophy, policy tools, information and data management needs, and triggering events.

The governance of adaptation: choices, reasons, and effects. Introduction to the Special Feature

The governance of climate adaptation involves the collective efforts of multiple societal actors to address problems, or to reap the benefits, associated with impacts of climate change. Governing involves the creation of institutions, rules and organizations, and the selection of normative principles to guide problem solution and institution building. We argue that actors involved in governing climate change adaptation, as climate change governance regimes evolve, inevitably must engage in making choices, for instance on problem definitions, jurisdictional levels, on modes of governance and policy instruments, and on the timing of interventions. Yet little is known about how and why these choices are made in practice, and how such choices affect the outcomes of our efforts to govern adaptation. In this introduction we review the current state of evidence and the specific contribution of the articles published in this Special Feature, which are aimed at bringing greater clarity in these matters, and thereby informing both governance theory and practice. Collectively, the contributing papers suggest that the way issues are defined has important consequences for the support for governance interventions, and their effectiveness. The articles suggest that currently the emphasis in adaptation governance is on the local and regional levels, while underscoring the benefits of interventions and governance at higher jurisdictional levels in terms of visioning and scaling-up effective approaches. The articles suggest that there is a central role of government agencies in leading governance interventions to address spillover effects, to provide public goods, and to promote the long-term perspectives for planning. They highlight the issue of justice in the governance of adaptation showing how governance measures have wide distributional consequences, including the potential to amplify existing inequalities, access to resources, or generating new injustices through distribution of risks. For several of these findings, future research directions are suggested.

COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE IN THE UNITED STATES AND KOREA: CASES IN NEGOTIATED POLICYMAKING AND SERVICE DELIVERY

Collaborative governance has been defined as the process of establishing, steering, facilitating, operating, and monitoring cross-sectoral organizational arrangements to address public policy problems that cannot be easily addressed by a single organization or the public sector alone (Ansell and Gash 2008). Although a worldwide phenomenon, the rise of collaborative governance in different countries can be attributed to different factors depending on specific historical and institutional contexts. These differences affect collaborative governing arrangements and their relative efficacy as tools for public problem solving. Yet in the emerging literature on collaborative governance, there have been few systematic efforts that compare collaborative governance across different nations. In this symposium, we take a step in this direction by examining experiences in two countries, the United States and Korea. In this introductory essay, we first outline some major forces that have been driving the rise of collaborative governance in each of the two countries. Then we explore the theoretical and policy problems raised by this trend in each country. Next, we provide an overview of the contributions to this symposium. THE RISE OF COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE IN THE UNITED STATES AND KOREA

A Governing Framework for Climate Change Adaptation in the Built Environment

Developing an approach to governing adaptation to climate change is severely hampered by the dictatorship of the present when the needs of future generations are inadequately represented in current policy making. We posit this problem as a function of the attributes of adaptation policy making, including deep uncertainty and nonstationarity, where past observations are not reliable predictors of future outcomes. Our research links organizational decision-making attributes with adaptation decision making and identifies cases in which adaptation actions cause spillovers, free riding, and distributional impacts. We develop a governing framework for adaptation that we believe will enable policy, planning, and major long-term development decisions to be made appropriately at all levels of government in the face of the deep uncertainty and nonstationarity caused by climate change. Our framework requires that approval of projects with an expected life span of 30 years or more in the built environment include minimum building standards that integrate forecasted climate change impacts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) intermediate scenario. The intermediate IPCC scenario must be downscaled to include local or regional temperature, water availability, sea level rise, susceptibility to forest fires, and human habitation impacts to minimize climate-change risks to the built environment. The minimum standard is systematically updated every six years to facilitate learning by formal and informal organizations. As a minimum standard, the governance framework allows jurisdictions to take stronger actions to increase their climate resilience and thus maintain system flexibility.

The Paradox of “Acting Globally While Thinking Locally” Discordance in Climate Change Adaption Policy

The paradox motivating this article is why California has acted globally by enacting a comprehensive mitigation policy to reduce the emissions of Greenhouse gases, a true public good since the benefits will be shared across the planet, but has not mustered the will to act locally through the adoption of an equally comprehensive adaptation policy for the state to protect its own public and private assets and interests. We attempt to explain the paradox by identifying what it is that differentiates climate change adaptation from mitigation, both substantively and politically. The paradox notwithstanding, we identify several imaginable adaptation policies and strategies that would be commensurate with individual and collective self-interested behavior.

Toward a National Strategic Investment Framework

America is entering a tumultuous period unrivaled in recent history. We are facing a disruption of our economy only rivaled by the Great Depression. We need to come to grips with our reliance on foreign oil that is at the heart of our national security problems. We are confronted with the challenge of global survival because of climate change. Finally, our economic growth over the past several decades has left many in America behind. These were the key issues in the recent presidential election, which was essentially an 18-month national visioning process that established societal goals of reducing CO2, decreasing dependence on imported oil, and increasing economic well-being for all Americans. The goals established through this extensive national debate and election started a transformation process that will enable America to overcome the enormous challenges we face and initiate an investment program that will continue for decades and through this century. The societal goals, articulated in broad scope, must now be translated by the President and Congress into explicit performance standards and policy directives, which will, in turn, be applied within each of the nation’s megaregions to create a “Strategic Investment Framework” to meet the national vision and goals. Our global competitors are keenly focused on how to envision and build this new 21st-century society. We must do the same.

Los Angeles' Clean Air Saga - Spanning the Three Epochs

Tracing the path that Los Angles has followed in significantly curbing its air pollution under the Federal and State Clean Air Acts over the course of four decades, this chapter illuminates both the struggle this has entailed and the importance of the three epochs developed in Chapter 1 of the book in interpreting it. The chapter focuses primarily on the evolution of the region’s efforts through the regulator and market-based epochs of the modern environmental movement, and its recent aspiration to enter into a more sustainable third epoch. The relative success of the effort is placed in the context of the tremendous growth in the size of the region’s population, economic growth, and continuously increasing number of cars, trucks, ships, and planes experienced during thedecades covered.

Understanding Collaborative Governance from the Structural Choice - Politics, IAD, and Transaction Cost Perspectives

Defined as the process of establishing, steering, facilitating, operating, and monitoring cross-sectoral organizational arrangements to address public policy problems, collaborative governance has emerged as an institutional form valued by both professional and research audiences across a growing range of policy arenas. Practice has preceded theory, however, and we know far more about particulars than how to explain from broader theoretical perspectives the emergence and viability of collaborative governance. This paper explores how three well established and related theoretical perspectives — structural choice politics, the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, and transaction cost analysis — can be used to bring theoretical clarity to the phenomenon of collaborative governance. In addition to suggesting research propositions from the three perspectives, the paper also proposes directions for future research.