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Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in Environmental Policy
Deploying Machine Learning For A Sustainable Future, Cary Coglianese
Deploying Machine Learning For A Sustainable Future, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
To meet the environmental challenges of a warming planet and an increasingly complex, high tech economy, government must become smarter about how it makes policies and deploys its limited resources. It specifically needs to build a robust capacity to analyze large volumes of environmental and economic data by using machine-learning algorithms to improve regulatory oversight, monitoring, and decision-making. Three challenges can be expected to drive the need for algorithmic environmental governance: more problems, less funding, and growing public demands. This paper explains why algorithmic governance will prove pivotal in meeting these challenges, but it also presents four likely obstacles that …
Regulatory Abdication In Practice, Cary Coglianese
Regulatory Abdication In Practice, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
“Meta-regulation” refers to deliberate efforts to induce private firms to create their own internal regulations—a regulatory strategy sometimes referred to as “management-based regulation” or even “regulation of self-regulation.” Meta-regulation is often presented as a flexible alternative to traditional “command-and-control” regulation. But does meta-regulation actually work? In her recent book, Meta-Regulation in Practice: Beyond Normative Views of Morality and Rationality, Fiona Simon purports to offer a critique of meta-regulation based on an extended case study of the often-feckless process of electricity regulatory reform undertaken in Australia in the early part of this century. Yet neither Simon’s case study nor her book …
Litigating Epa Rules: A Fifty-Year Retrospective Of Environmental Rulemaking In The Courts, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
Litigating Epa Rules: A Fifty-Year Retrospective Of Environmental Rulemaking In The Courts, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
Over the last fifty years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found itself repeatedly defending its regulations before federal judges. The agency’s engagement with the federal judiciary has resulted in prominent Supreme Court decisions, such as Chevron v. NRDC and Massachusetts v. EPA, which have left a lasting imprint on federal administrative law. Such prominent litigation has also fostered, for many observers, a longstanding impression of an agency besieged by litigation. In particular, many lawyers and scholars have long believed that unhappy businesses or environmental groups challenge nearly every EPA rule in court. Although some empirical studies have …
Management-Based Regulation, Cary Coglianese, Shana M. Starobin
Management-Based Regulation, Cary Coglianese, Shana M. Starobin
All Faculty Scholarship
Environmental regulators have embraced management-based regulation as a flexible instrument for addressing a range of important problems often poorly addressed by other types of regulations. Under management-based regulation, regulated firms must engage in management-related activities oriented toward addressing targeted problems—such as planning and analysis to mitigate risk and the implementation of internal management systems geared towards continuous improvement. In contrast with more restrictive forms of regulation which can impose one-size-fits-all solutions, management-based regulation offers firms greater operational choice about how to solve regulatory problems, leveraging firms’ internal informational advantage to innovate and search for alternative measures to achieve the intended …
Capturing Regulatory Agendas?: An Empirical Study Of Industry Use Of Rulemaking Petitions, Daniel Walters
Capturing Regulatory Agendas?: An Empirical Study Of Industry Use Of Rulemaking Petitions, Daniel Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
A great deal of skepticism toward administrative agencies stems from the widespread perception that they excessively or even exclusively cater to business interests. From the political right comes the accusation that business interests use regulation to erect barriers to entry that protect profits and stifle competition. From the political left comes the claim that business interests use secretive interactions with agencies to erode and negate beneficial regulatory programs. Regulatory “capture” theory elevates many of these claims to the status of economic law. Despite growing skepticism about capture theory in academic circles, empirical studies of business influence and capture return ambiguous …
Preserving Life By Ranking Rights, John William Draper
Preserving Life By Ranking Rights, John William Draper
Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law
Border walls, abortion, and the death penalty are the current battlegrounds of the right to life. We will visit each topic and more in this paper, as we consider ranking groups of constitutional rights.
The enumerated rights of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—life, liberty, and property—merit special treatment. They have a deeper and richer history that involves ranking. Ranking life in lexical priority over liberty and property rights protects life first and maximizes safe liberty and property rights in the absence of a significant risk to life. This is not new law; aspects of it …
Human Survival, Risk, And Law: Considering Risk Filters To Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis, John William Draper
Human Survival, Risk, And Law: Considering Risk Filters To Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis, John William Draper
Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law
Selfish utilitarianism, neo-classical economics, the directive of short-term income maximization, and the decision tool of cost-benefit analysis fail to protect our species from the significant risks of too much consumption, pollution, or population. For a longer-term survival, humanity needs to employ more than cost-justified precaution.
This article argues that, at the global level, and by extension at all levels of government, we need to replace neo-classical economics with filters for safety and feasibility to regulate against significant risk. For significant risks, especially those that are irreversible, we need decision tools that will protect humanity at all scales. This article describes …
Motivating Without Mandates: The Role Of Voluntary Programs In Environmental Governance, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
Motivating Without Mandates: The Role Of Voluntary Programs In Environmental Governance, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
All Faculty Scholarship
For the last several decades, governments around the world have tried to use so-called voluntary programs to motivate private firms to act proactively to protect the environment. Unlike conventional environmental regulation, voluntary programs offer businesses flexibility to adopt cost-effective measures to reduce environmental impacts. Rather than prodding firms to act through threats of enforcement, they aim to entice firms to move forward by offering various kinds of positive incentives, ranging from public recognition to limited forms of regulatory relief. Despite the theoretical appeal of voluntary programs, their proper role in government’s environmental toolkit depends on the empirical evidence of how …
Endogenous Decentralization In Federal Environmental Policies, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman, Leah G. Traub
Endogenous Decentralization In Federal Environmental Policies, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman, Leah G. Traub
All Faculty Scholarship
Under most federal environmental laws and some health and safety laws, states may apply for “primacy,” that is, authority to implement and enforce federal law, through a process known as “authorization.” Some observers fear that states use authorization to adopt more lax policies in a regulatory “race to the bottom.” This paper presents a simple model of the interaction between the federal and state governments in such a scheme of partial decentralization. Our model suggests that the authorization option may not only increase social welfare but also allow more stringent environmental regulations than would otherwise be feasible. Our model also …
Presidential Control Of Administrative Agencies: A Debate Over Law Or Politics?, Cary Coglianese
Presidential Control Of Administrative Agencies: A Debate Over Law Or Politics?, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
Recent controversy over the unitary executive may be part of what Steven Calabresi and Christopher Yoo have called the “oldest debate in constitutional law.” Yet in this essay, I ask whether this debate is as much legal as it is political. Focusing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to grant California a waiver from national automobile emissions standards, I contrast the divergent reactions to presidential influence under President Bush and President Obama. In both administrations the EPA faced clear presidential pressure, but critics of President Bush’s involvement generally applauded the actions taken by President Obama. The main difference appears to …
Government Clubs: Theory And Evidence From Voluntary Environmental Programs, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
Government Clubs: Theory And Evidence From Voluntary Environmental Programs, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
All Faculty Scholarship
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established numerous voluntary environmental programs over the last fifteen years, seeking to encourage businesses to make environmental progress beyond what current law requires them to achieve. EPA aims to induce beyond-compliance behavior by offering various forms of recognition and rewards, including relief from otherwise applicable environmental regulations. Despite EPA's emphasis on voluntary programs,relatively few businesses have availed themselves of these programs -- and paradoxically, the programs that offer the most significant regulatory benefits tend to have the fewest members. We explain this paradox by focusing on (a) how programs'membership screening corresponds with membership …
Evaluating The Social Effects Of Environmental Leadership Programs, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
Evaluating The Social Effects Of Environmental Leadership Programs, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
All Faculty Scholarship
In the past decade, EPA and over 20 states have created voluntary environmental leadership programs designed to recognize and reward businesses that take steps that go beyond compliance with the strictures of environmental law. Environmental leadership programs seek not only to spur direct improvements to environment quality but also to advance broader social goals that may lead indirectly to environmental improvements, such as improving business-government relationships and changing business culture. Measuring progress toward leadership programs’ social goals is a particularly challenging but essential task if researchers and decision makers are to understand the full impacts of these programs. In this …
Environmental Leadership Programs: Toward An Empirical Assessment Of Their Performance*, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
Environmental Leadership Programs: Toward An Empirical Assessment Of Their Performance*, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
All Faculty Scholarship
Over the past decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and states have developed environmental leadership programs (ELPs), a type of voluntary environmental program designed to recognize facilities with strong environmental performance records and encourage facilities to perform better. Proponents argue that ELPs overcome some of the limitations of traditional environmental regulation by encouraging managers to address the full gamut of environmental problems posed by their facilities, reducing the costs of environmental regulation, easing adversarialism, and fostering positive culture change. Although ELPs have been in place for at least five years at the federal level and in seventeen states, these …
The Managerial Turn In Environmental Policy, Cary Coglianese
The Managerial Turn In Environmental Policy, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Policymaking Under Pressure: The Perils Of Incremental Responses To Climate Change, Cary Coglianese, Jocelyn D’Ambrosio
Policymaking Under Pressure: The Perils Of Incremental Responses To Climate Change, Cary Coglianese, Jocelyn D’Ambrosio
All Faculty Scholarship
Federal policymakers’ reluctance to enact a comprehensive climate change policy during the past decade has coincided with increased awareness of the inevitability and severity of the problems from global climate change. Thus, it is no surprise that piecemeal, sub-federal policies have garnered considerable support. Bolstered by the political science literature on the promise of incrementalism and democratic experimentalism, many proponents of climate change action favor incremental steps in the hope that they will improve the environment or at least serve as a basis for more comprehensive policies. Against this hopeful view, we explain why ad hoc responses to climate change …
Risk Equity: A New Proposal, Matthew D. Adler
Risk Equity: A New Proposal, Matthew D. Adler
All Faculty Scholarship
What does distributive justice require of risk regulators? Various executive orders enjoin health and safety regulators to take account of “distributive impacts,” “equity,” or “environmental justice,” and many scholars endorse these requirements. But concrete methodologies for evaluating the equity effects of risk regulation policies remain undeveloped. The contrast with cost-benefit analysis--now a very well developed set of techniques --is stark. Equity analysis by governmental agencies that regulate health and safety risks, at least in the United States, lacks rigor and structure. This Article proposes a rigorous framework for risk-equity analysis, which I term “probabilistic population profile analysis” (PPPA). PPPA is …
Policy Analysis For Natural Hazards: Some Cautionary Lessons From Environmental Policy Analysis, Matthew D. Adler
Policy Analysis For Natural Hazards: Some Cautionary Lessons From Environmental Policy Analysis, Matthew D. Adler
All Faculty Scholarship
How should agencies and legislatures evaluate possible policies to mitigate the impacts of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural hazards? In particular, should governmental bodies adopt the sorts of policy-analytic and risk assessment techniques that are widely used in the area of environmental hazards (chemical toxins and radiation)? Environmental hazards policy analysis regularly employs proxy tests, in particular tests of technological “feasibility,” rather than focusing on a policy’s impact on well-being. When human welfare does enter the analysis, particular aspects of well-being, such as health and safety, are often given priority over others. “Individual risk” tests and other features of …
Shifting Sands: The Limits Of Science In Setting Risk Standards, Cary Coglianese, Gary E. Marchant
Shifting Sands: The Limits Of Science In Setting Risk Standards, Cary Coglianese, Gary E. Marchant
All Faculty Scholarship
Regulators need to rely on science to understand problems and predict the consequences of regulatory actions, but over reliance on science can actually contribute to, or at least deflect attention from, incoherent policymaking. In this article, we explore the problems with using science to justify policy decisions by analyzing the Environmental Protection Agency's recently revised air quality standards for ground-level ozone and particulate matter, some of the most significant regulations ever issued. In revising these standards, EPA mistakenly invoked science as the exclusive basis for its decisions and deflected attention from a remarkable series of inconsistencies. For example, even though …
The Epa's Risky Reasoning, Cary Coglianese, Gary E. Marchant
The Epa's Risky Reasoning, Cary Coglianese, Gary E. Marchant
All Faculty Scholarship
Regulators must rely on science to understand problems and predict the consequences of regulatory actions, but science by itself cannot justify public policy decisions. We review the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to justify recent changes to its National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone and particulate matter, showing how the agency was able to cloak its policy judgments under the guise of scientific objectivity. By doing so, the EPA evaded accountability for a shifting and incoherent set of policy positions that will have major implications for public health and the economy. For example, even though EPA claimed to base …
Building Sector-Based Consensus: A Review Of The Epa's Common Sense Initiative, Cary Coglianese, Laurie K. Allen
Building Sector-Based Consensus: A Review Of The Epa's Common Sense Initiative, Cary Coglianese, Laurie K. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
In the late 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted what the agency considered to be a "bold experiment" in regulatory reinvention, bringing representatives from six industrial sectors together with government officials and NGO representatives to forge a consensus on innovations in public policy and business practices. This paper assesses the impact of the agency's "experiment" - called the Common Sense Initiative (CSI) - in terms of the agency's goals of improving regulatory performance and technological innovation. Based on a review of CSI projects across all six sectors, the paper shows how EPA achieved, at best, quite modest accomplishments. …
Performance-Based Regulation: Prospects And Limitations In Health, Safety And Environmental Protection, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
Performance-Based Regulation: Prospects And Limitations In Health, Safety And Environmental Protection, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
All Faculty Scholarship
Regulation aims to improve the performance of individual and organizational behavior in ways that reduce social harms, whether by improving industry's environmental performance, increasing the safety of transportation systems, or reducing workplace risk. With this in mind, the phrase "performance-based regulation" might seem a bit redundant, since all regulation should aim to improve performance in ways that advance social goals. Yet regulators can direct those they govern to improve their performance in at least two basic ways. They can prescribe exactly what actions regulated entities must take to improve their performance. Or they can incorporate the regulation's goal into the …