Authoritative and trusted, Environmental Policy once again brings together top scholars to evaluate the changes and continuities in American environmental policy since the late 1960s and their implications for the twenty-first century. Students will learn to decipher the underlying trends, institutional constraints, and policy dilemmas that shape today’s environmental politics. The Tenth Edition examines how policy has changed within federal institutions and state and local governments, as well as how environmental governance affects private sector policies and practices. The book provides in-depth examinations of public policy dilemmas including fracking, food production, urban sustainability, and the viability of using market solutions to address policy challenges. Students will also develop a deeper understanding of global issues such as climate change governance, the implications of the Paris Agreement, and the role of environmental policy in the developing world. Students walk away with a measured yet hopeful evaluation of the future challenges policymakers will confront as the American environmental movement continues to affect the political process.
Available this summer in its Eighth Edition, RosenbaumÆs classic, comprehensive text once more provides definitive coverage of environmental politics and policy, lively case material, and a balanced assessment of current environmental issues. Notable revisions include: * A completely revamped energy chapter covering conventional energy policy as well as a comparative examination of alternatives to current energy production. ò Expanded discussion of current U.S. climate change policy with attention to the role of the states, the impact of global environmental politics, and emerging technologies on policy alternatives. ò Analysis of the Obama administrationÆs energy agenda and its profound differences from Bush administration policies and the practical difficulties of creating an effective political coalition in support of the new policy agenda. ò Greater emphasis on executive-congressional relations in the policy-making cycle. ò Examination of changes in the environmental movement, with particular attention to newly emerging cleavages over energy and climate issues. ò A thorough updating of all policy chapters, including an examination of such topics as ômountain top removal,ö the emergence of Bisphenol A as an endocrine disruptor issue, and the ônew NIMBYism.ö New and revised tables, figures, and other data illustrate key environmental information while a new, detailed timeline frames the initial chapterÆs historical narrative of evolving environmental policy.
Prior to the Nixon administration, environmental policy in the United States was rudimentary at best. Since then, it has evolved into one of the primary concerns of governmental policy from the federal to the local level. As scientific expertise on the environment rapidly developed, Americans became more aware of the growing environmental crisis that surrounded them. Practical solutions for mitigating various aspects of the crisis - air pollution, water pollution, chemical waste dumping, strip mining, and later global warming - became politically popular, and the government responded by gradually erecting a vast regulatory apparatus to address the issue. Today, politicians regard environmental policy as one of the most pressing issues they face. The Obama administration has identified the renewable energy sector as a key driver of economic growth, and Congress is in the process of passing a bill to reduce global warming that will be one of the most important environmental policy acts in decades. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy will be a state-of-the-art work on all aspects of environmental policy in America. Over the past half century, America has been the world's leading emitter of global warming gases. However, environmental policy is not simply a national issue. It is a global issue, and the explosive growth of Asian countries like China and India mean that policy will have to be coordinated at the international level. The book will therefore focus not only on the U.S., but on the increasing importance of global policies and issues on American regulatory efforts. This is a topic that will only grow in importance in the coming years, and this will serve as an authoritative guide to any scholar interested in the issue.
In 1970, due to increasing public concern about the environment, a dramatic series of bipartisan actions were taken to expand the national government's efforts to control pollutants. In that year, the Congress and President Nixon established two key federal agencies to address the nation's growing environmental problems: the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But despite this initial recognition of the pressing problems presented by environmental degradation, support for related policymaking and administration waxed and waned over the next thirty-five years, as other domestic and foreign policy problems rose to the top of the public and legislative agendas. What does the future hold for environmental policy in the United States, given the highly polarized politics surrounding the issue today? In this book, James K. Conant and Peter J. Balint examine what happened to the CEQ and EPA between 1970 and 2010 by using changes in leadership and budgetary resources as key indicators of the agencies' vitality and capacity for implementing pollution control laws. They also examine correlations between the agencies' fortunes and various social, political, and economic variables. The authors conclude with several scenarios about what the future holds for these important environmental agencies.
This two-volume set provides an authoritative overview of the major environmental issues of the 21st century, with a special focus on current challenges, trends, and policy choices. This set provides an up-to-date, comprehensive, and focused resource for understanding the nature and scope of environmental challenges facing the United States and the world in the 21st century, as well as options for meeting those challenges. Volume One covers environmental trends and challenges within the United States, while Volume Two illuminates environmental issues and choices around the world. Issues covered in both volumes include vital topics such as climate change, air and water pollution, natural resource and species protection, and agricultural/industrial impacts on the environment and public health. For all topics, the authors—scholars and experts hailing from a wide range of environmental and policy fields—detail a range of political, social, and economic options for the future and explain why the issue in question is important for society and people as well as the natural world.
American Public Policy provides a comprehensive overview of the policy-making process from procedural approaches and policy instruments to in-depth analysis of specific policy issues. The Twelfth Edition covers new topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the rising costs of health care, and the rollback of environmental regulations under the Trump administration.
A comprehensive analysis of diverse areas of scholarly research on U.S. environmental policy and politics, this Handbook looks at the key ideas, theoretical frameworks, empirical findings and methodological approaches to the topic. Leading environmental policy scholars emphasize areas of emerging research and opportunities for future enquiry.
The fifth edition of this well-regarded text covers the period up through the 2012 elections. It has been revised to make it sleeker, more concise, and up-to-date with a clear organisational structure. This edition accomplishes these three important goals: First, it introduces readers to the American approach to public policy making as it has been shaped by our political institutions, changing circumstances, and ideology. Second, it surveys American public policy and policymaking in all the major policy areas from economic policy to health care policy to environmental policy, and does so clearly and even-handedly, with well-selected illustrations, case studies, terms, and study questions. Finally, in addition to providing analytical tools and empirical information, the book challenges readers to come to terms with the widely shared but often competing values that must be balanced and rebalanced in the ongoing policy making process, affecting issues of the highest concern to the American public.
Explores why past generations of radical ecological and social justice scholarship have been ineffective, and considers the work of a new wave of scholarship that aims to reinvent the radical project and combat injustice. In Postpolitics and the Limits of Nature, Andy Scerri offers a comprehensive overview of the critical theory project from the 1960s to the present, refracted through the lens of US politics and the American Left. He examines why past generations of radical ecological and social justice scholarship have been ineffective in the fight against injustice and rampant environmental exploitation. Scerri then engages a new wave of radicals and reformists who, in the wake of the Occupy movement and the 2016 presidential election, are reinventing the radical project as a challenge to injustice in the Anthropocene era. Along the way, he provides a fresh account of the thought of one of the major contributors to critical theory, Theodor Adorno, and of recent work that seeks to link Adornos ideas to the so-called new realism in political philosophy and political theory. This book is something like an histoire événementielle of contending philosophies of nature and the natural in relation to economy and politics over the past 60-odd years. What is impressive is the way Scerri situates the many different activists/scholars and views in the transition from Keynesian regulatory society to naturalized neoliberalism. Thus, authors are treated not as timeless purveyors of theory but, rather, as political economists rooted in the trends and currents of their particular time. I believe this will be an important book. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, coauthor of Environmental Politics for a Changing World: Power, Perspectives, and Practice, Second Edition
This book provides an in-depth analysis of the securitisation of climate change in the US, Germany and Mexico and offers a rethinking of securitisation theory. Resting on a Foucauldian governmentality approach, it discusses how different climate security discourses have transformed the political handling of climate change and affected policies, practices and institutions. Going beyond the literature’s predominant focus on the global level, it gives a fine-grained examination of the political and institutional changes in different national contexts. Drawing on the governmentalisation of security, the book develops a new understanding of securitisation that focuses on the role of power. In doing so, it provides new insights into the transformative potential of linking climate change to security but also highlights the political and normative pitfalls of securitisation. ‘In this important book, Franziskus von Lucke provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich account of the relationship between security and climate change. Developing a Foucauldian-inspired account of securitization, the book rejects blanket or universal claims about the climate change- security relationship, instead insisting on the need to critically examine how the securitization of climate change plays out in particular empirical contexts. Exploring the cases of the US, Germany and Mexico, von Lucke points to distinctive dynamics of securitization in these settings, with different implications for the practices these in turn encourage. Ultimately, this book constitutes an important addition to literature on the relationship between climate change and security, while developing a distinct and nuanced account of securitization that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars of security in international relations.’ —Associate Professor Matt McDonald is a Reader in International Relations at the University of Queensland, Australia ‘In 2019 a number of states and other actors (notably the European Union) have made climate emergency declarations. It is therefore more important than ever to understand what the securitization of the climate means. That is: Who can securitize? What security measures are likely/ deemed legitimate by relevant audiences? How does securitization affect the population within and outside a securitizing state? And perhaps most importantly of all, will it succeed? Franziskus von Lucke’s carefully researched book offers answers to all of these questions and many others besides. von Lucke proceeds by examining with the US, Mexico and Germany, three real-life empirical cases of climate securitization. Each one provides unique insights that enable a fuller understanding of climate security. Accessibly written this is a must read for scholars and practitioners alike.’ —Dr Rita Floyd, University of Birmingham, UK, author of The Morality of Security: A theory of just Securitization, CUP, 2019 With great empirical detail and conceptual clarity, the book compares discourses and practices of climate security in different contexts. An essential reading for anyone interested in international climate politics, securitization theory, governmentality and the notion of power in International Relations. —Dr Delf Rothe, Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy Hamburg at the University of Hamburg, Germany