Document Type

Article

Publication Title

University of Chicago Legal Forum

Abstract

Adoption of new approaches to securing the national good of environmental quality will depend critically on the intermediaries who determine or influence how public demand for environmental quality is channeled into the design and implementation of concrete environmental policy measures. These intermediaries are political and policy entrepreneurs, the media, legislators, regulators and administrators, environmental groups, industry, and others. Many of these intermediaries have a strong vested interest in the existing centralized command and control system. Many will continue to try to use environmental regulation to extract rents or otherwise advance their interests. These realities must be taken into account in any effort to develop and win acceptance for alternative approaches. Concerns about distributional equity and environmental justice must also be taken into account. On the other hand, the regulatory status quo is coming under increasingly severe pressure because of its inherent inability to meet demands for maintaining or improving environmental quality at acceptable economic and social cost. These demands are likely to intensify with the potential emergence of global climate change as an overarching environmental issue and increasing recognition of the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem conservation. The increasing interconnection between environmental policy and international trade, investment, and competition will also generate strong pressures to reconstitute the current U.S. environmental regulatory status quo in order to eliminate its unnecessary costs, rigidities, and obstructions to innovation and investment, and to substitute incentive systems focused on resource efficiency. The dominant system of federal command-and- control regulation was an understandable and reasonably successful "first generation" response to rapidly emergent environmental concerns. It is, however, reaching its inherent limits as regulatory programs mature and competing environmental and economic demands escalate. These systemic factors will favor new approaches to securing the national good of environmental quality, including those outlined herein as well as others discussed elsewhere in this Symposium.

First Page

199

Volume

1997

Publication Date

1997

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