New Tools for Environmental Protection Education, Information, and Voluntary Measures (2002) / Chapter Skim
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11. Community Environmental Policy Capacity and Effective Environmental Protection
11. Community Environmental Policy Capacity and Effective Environmental Protection
Pages 183-200
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From page 183... ...
The political result is a growing effort to shift away from a federal command-and-control paradigm toward more community-specific approaches that are based on local decision making and that create opportunities for collaboration among agencies, local governments, industry, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) , and citizens.
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From page 184... ...
In other cases, local protection efforts may respond to an external governing body telling the community that it must act; however, the consequent actions can be considered locally based only if the community is given discretion to determine what type of action to take. In California, for example, the state required local jurisdictions to reduce solid waste disposal by 50 percent, but gave localities significant latitude to determine how to achieve those reductions.
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From page 185... ...
Persuasion/ Door-to-door advocacy on Sonoma County Conservation endorsement environmental issues and Action: door-to-door candidates; phone banks grassroots organizing to mobilize letters to elected officials and familiarize voters with candidates' voting records (Sonoma County Conservation Action, (2002) Lifestyle changes Promotion of environmentally Citizens in Los Angeles can beneficial behaviors and actions attend free "Smart Gardening Classes" offered by the city to promote backyard composting (City of Los Angeles, 2002)
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From page 186... ...
To guide research into the conditions shaping community willingness and ability to implement effective environmental measures on a local level, we rely on a policy capacity model (Press, 1998; Boyne, 1985; Ringquist, 1993~. A successful policy capacity model for explanatory and heuristic purposes should identify all the theoretically plausible independent variables, then explain the mechanisms by which each variable potentially could affect environmental outcomes.
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From page 187... ...
conception of institutional performance, we envision a relatively simple model of policy capacity and performance. The model is integrative, relying on four general components that contribute to a community's environmental problem-solving ability.
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From page 188... ...
Collective norms strongly influence factors within the policy network, such as the political ideology of elected officials and the focus of local interest groups. In the model of a community with strong environmental policy capacity, the social norm is to expect a high level of environmentally sound individual behavior and institutional performance.
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From page 189... ...
External influences Government Civil society Tax revenues Current regulations Government type and/or size Demographics Political ideology Party identification Environmental values/support/knowledge Civic environmentalism/voluntarism Landscape features Development pressure Taxable sales Employment State/provincial and/or federal grants State/provincial and/or federal mandates State/provincial and/or federal fines State/provincial and federal nongovernmental organizations Private foundation grants Environmental Droughts Floods Regional and state/provincial economic activity Regional development pressure Bureaucratic commitment Attention from elected officials Policy entrepreneurialism Administrative and technical expertise Interest group activity and mobilization Local foundation funding Grassroots activism Business advocacy groups Market (c) Policy network Government Civil society Market (d)
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From page 190... ...
Outputs Whereas local environmentalism may provide the political will for environmental action, local wealth can provide the fiscal resources required for effective community action. The community policy networks attempting to address environmental problems vary quite a bit in their ability to raise local funds, either because they attract a different tax base or because they vary in public support for ballot-box financing of bonds, taxes, and fees.
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From page 191... ...
policy network, which may be similar to the one that generated the output, or may be a completely different policy network, or may be a mixture of both. A city's recycling program requires citizen participation; a county's carpool program may rely on support from local businesses; an environmental group's habitat restoration program relies on membership participation; a bond measure for open space acquisition funds may hinge on voter approval.
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From page 192... ...
. As the policy capacity model suggests, internal community factors may influence local policy outputs and environmental outcomes.
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From page 193... ...
. o- , , , , , , , 1 5.5 6 6.5 7 7.5 8 8.5 Log local government revenues, 1965-96 FIGURE 11-4 Local government revenues versus local acres protected.
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From page 194... ...
However, because the items included in this data set are among the most common materials collected by curbside and other local recycling programs, they should provide a reliable (albeit limited) indication of recycling levels.
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From page 195... ...
For example, we measured community interest in and support for environmental protection (i.e., local civic environmentalism) using county percentage of registered Green Party voters in 1999 and county average vote on statewide environmental measures from 1998-2000 (see Figure 11-6~.7 Both voting and party registration are acts of civic responsibility.
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From page 196... ...
ably strong predictor of per capita recycling levels (R2= 0.57, p< 0.0001~.8 Figure 11-7 contains a scatterplot of these results.9 SOLID WASTE, OPEN SPACE, AND THE POLICY CAPACITY MODEL Most of the independent variables explored in the two cases we provided would be classified as internal civil society, government, and environmental variables in the policy capacity model. How do such internal factors shape open space protection and recycling activity?
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From page 197... ...
For example, a little time and effort on the part of some water district staff results in miles of stream cleanups on many weekends throughout the country. Second, agency officials who actively encourage and respect participation by volunteers and community groups benefit from not only from local activities that relieve their management burdens, but also from the wide, sustained political support that may follow.
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From page 198... ...
7 Both the Green Party data and the environmental ballot approval data were downloaded from the California Secretary of State's Web site. The Green Party variable was created by taking total registered Green Party voters in a county for 1999 and dividing that figure by the total number of registered voters in the county for the same year.
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From page 199... ...
. California Spatial Information Library 2000 Unpublished data provided to authors.
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From page 200... ...
:375-383. Sonoma County Conservation Action 2002 Effective Organizing for Sonoma County's Environment.
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