Mark Stephan

Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance

Coming Clean is the first book to investigate the process of information disclosure as a policy strategy for environmental protection. This process, which requires that firms disclose information about their environmental performance, is part of an approach to environmental protection that eschews the conventional command-and-control regulatory apparatus, which sometimes leads government and industry to focus on meeting only minimal standards. The authors of Coming Clean examine the effectiveness of information disclosure in achieving actual improvements in corporate environmental performance by analyzing data from the federal governments Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI, and drawing on an original set of survey data from corporations and federal, state, and local officials, among other sources. The authors find that TRI -- probably the best-known example of information disclosure--has had a substantial effect over time on the environmental performance of industry. But, drawing on case studies from across the nation, they show that the improvement is not uniform: some facilities have been leaders while others have been laggards. The authors argue that information disclosure has an important role to play in environmental policy -- but only as part of an integrated set of policy tools that includes conventional regulation.

The Limits of Civic Environmentalism

Two key components of civic environmentalism are the devolution of policy control of environmental policy from the federal government to states and localities and the increase of local citizen participation in policy decision making. Using a combination of case studies and interviews, the authors suggest that devolution of policy making and policy implementation may not increase the role of citizens. Rather, due to both the participatory mechanisms used and the larger trends in political participation in democratic societies, citizen involvement may be limited in significant ways. Although evidence is found that citizens can and do influence policy under certain circumstances, there is also cautionary evidence to suggest that this influence is not widespread and does not include representative samples of local communities. The authors conclude that for civic environmentalism to be truly civic, barriers to participation must be acknowledged and overcome.

Environmental Information Disclosure and Risk Reduction among the States

In what has become a rite of spring, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agen cy (EPA) each year publishes a report of the latest data from the Toxics Release In ventory (TRI). This prominent information disclosure program is grounded in the as sumption that revealing manufacturing pol lution information will spur better industrial environmental performance (Graham and Miller 2001; Hamilton 2005).These data and the innovative program from which they are generated have received considerable scrutiny among researchers. Yet most of this research analyzes national or facility-level trends (Grant, Jones, and Bergesen 2002; Grant, Jones, and Trautner 2004) rather than variation among the states. Although researchers interested in state variations have studied other kinds of