Daniel J. Fiorino

Citizen Participation and Environmental Risk: A Survey of Institutional Mechanisms:

Standard approaches to defining and evaluating environmental risk tend to reflect technocratic rather than democratic values. One consequence is that institutional mechanisms for achieving citizen participation in risk decisions rarely are studied or evaluated. This article presents a survey of five institutional mechanisms for allowing the lay public to influence environmental risk decisions: public hearings, initiatives, public surveys, negotiated rule making, and citizens review panels. It also defines democratic process criteria for assessing these and other participatory mechanisms.

Regulatory Negotiation as a Form of Public Participation

The growth of administrative power in the first two-thirds of this century posed a dilemma for democratic societies: How do they reconcile democratic process with the powers invested in non-elected administrative officials? A resort to administrative power to deal with the complex issues of modern society was almost inevitable. Legislatures simply lacked the capacity to develop the necessary technical expertise, establish the needed administrative routines, and concentrate the required attention on the narrow sets of issues that twentieth-century governments had to address — whether it was financial markets, food and drug safety, transportation, energy or environmental quality. Administrative agencies were an answer to one set of questions — of how to organize government to deal with the demands of modern society — but they raised an entirely new set of questions related to democratic control and accountability.

Innovation in U.S. Environmental Policy Is the Future Here

Although the need for environmental protection is generally accepted in the United States, there is debate over what form environmental policies should take. The articles in this collection offer a variety of perspectives on the need for policy innovation to deal with the challenges of the future. Their common themes are the need for bottom-up problem solving, the value of nonregulatory approaches, the importance of citizen participation, the use of the precautionary principle, and a focus on ecological as well as health issues.

Teaching environmental policy in an era of polarization and misrepresentation

The current national leadership in the United States poses challenges for anyone teaching in the environmental policy field. Although previous political administrations have been critical of environmental programs, the Trump administration poses new and different kinds of threats, among them a rejection of scientific analysis, selective use of policy data, a disregard for long-term threats like climate change, and a lack of policy and scientific integrity. Teachers of environmental policy should recognize these issues while building the capacities of students for using policy and scientific analysis critically and with integrity.

National environmental policies as shelter from the storm: specifying the relationship between extreme weather vulnerability and national environmental performance

Empirical evidence regarding what causes some nations to display better environmental performance than others is still needed. Several case-based studies exist, as do studies that focus on developed countries and OECD members, but little systematic work has compared environmental performance across a worldwide sample of nations to discern, at the domestic level, why some nations are more “green” than others. This paper uses the Environmental Performance Index (2014) to explore the association between environmental performance and “conventional wisdom” variables that scholars have used to explain performance. While the article debunks the traditional explanations of regime type and international treaty participation, it identifies more relevant determinants, namely, a nation’s vulnerability to extreme weather events. Using an ordinary least squares regression, we find that whether the country is democratic or authoritarian is not by itself significant; nor is whether the nation is a signatory to major international treaties. Instead, vulnerability measured as human and economic losses after extreme weather events impact environmental performance significantly. Future research should explore the strong possibility that the effects of political institutions on environmental performance are mitigated by other factors such vulnerability to climate change.