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Misunderstanding Models In Environmental And Public Health Regulation, Wendy E. Wagner, Elizabeth Fisher, Pasky Pascual
Misunderstanding Models In Environmental And Public Health Regulation, Wendy E. Wagner, Elizabeth Fisher, Pasky Pascual
Wendy E. Wagner
Computational models are fundamental to environmental regulation, yet their capabilities tend to be misunderstood by policymakers. Rather than rely on models to illuminate dynamic and uncertain relationships in natural settings, models are too often used by policymakers as “answer machines.” This fundamental misperception that models can generate decisive facts leads to a chain reaction of problems that begin with policymaking itself, but then radiate into the science of modeling and into regulatory deliberations where regulatory participants can exploit the misunderstanding in strategic ways. This paper documents the pervasive misperception of models as truth machines in U.S. regulation and the multi-layered …
Administrative Law, Filter Failure, And Information Capture, Wendy E. Wagner
Administrative Law, Filter Failure, And Information Capture, Wendy E. Wagner
Wendy E. Wagner
There are no provisions in administrative law for regulating the flow of information coming in or leaving the system or to ensure that regulatory participants can keep up with a rising tide of issues, details, and technicalities. Indeed, a number of doctrinal refinements, intended originally to ensure that executive branch decisions are made in the “sunlight,” inadvertently create incentives for participants to overwhelm the administrative system with complex information, causing much of the decision-making processes to remain, for all practical purposes, in the dark. As these agency decisions become increasingly obscure to all but the most well-informed insiders, administrative accountability …