THE USE OF RISK ANALYSIS IN FEDERAL REGULATORY AGENCIES: AN EXPLORATION1

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the role of risk analysis in seven federal agencies concerned with health, safety, and environmental regulation. Interviews with key decision-makers suggest that the use of risk analysis has increased in recent years, but that its employment in risk management decision-making varies considerably both within given agencies and across agencies and policy areas. Despite methodological and institutional constraints, risk analysis is likely to play a greater role in the future as demands for comparative assessment of technological risks increase.     

Spatial Regulation of Air Toxics Hot Spots

This paper analyzes the potential implications, in terms of net social costs and distribution of risks and abatement costs, of a policy to address the problem of air toxics “hot spots.” The policy we analyze involves regulation of air toxics sources at increasingly finer spatial resolutions. We develop a model of a decisionmaker choosing emission standards within a net cost minimization framework. Empirical application of the model to two counties in Florida demonstrates that regulation at finer resolutions could involve trade‐offs between net social costs and equitable distribution of risks and, in some settings, between individual and population risks.     

Stimulating ‘green’ technological innovation: An analysis of alternative policy mechanisms

As our understanding of human impacts on the environment has increased, it has become clear that we need to move toward a closed-loop industrial society in order to avoid undesirable health and ecosystem consequences. Achievement of this goal depends on radical technological innovation in both products and processes. This paper explores how to design public policy mechanisms to stimulate rather than impede pollution-preventing technological innovation. It begins with a discussion of the role of government in civilian technology development and diffusion. It then sets out six design criteria for policy to promote green technology innovation. Based on this set of design criteria, the article assesses the potential and limitations of current U.S. policy approaches to stimulate technological innovation that moves us toward a minimal waste society. The main conclusions of this assessment are as follows. Over the past decade, the U.S. environmental policy system has experienced a variety of reforms and new initiatives, many aimed directly at promoting environmentally-friendly technological change. The strengths of these reforms are to increase the information that the private sector has about the magnitude and cost of their environmental impacts and to allow greater flexibility in the technologies that firms choose to meet environmental regulations and goals. Because of these reforms, firms are likely to undertake technological innovation for the environment in situations with clear short-term economic benefits, i.e. to capture the much heralded win-win potential of environmental regulation. However, these reforms have significant weaknesses as well. Unless policy provides stronger political or economic incentives and clearer signals about future environmental performance requirements, we are unlikely to be able to drive technological innovation in industries where the pay-off is more longterm or uncertain, and thus will make only limited progress toward the goal of a minimal waste society.     

Investigating the influence of social costs and benefits of environmental policies through social capital theory

The level of effectiveness of an environmental policy depends to a significant degree on the level of acceptance and cooperation of citizens. The relevant literature indicates that social capital may significantly influence environmentally responsible behaviour connected with the implementation of an environmental policy. In this context, the present article aims to further explore this field by introducing the issue of non-economic social costs and benefits imposed from environmental policies. In particular, it is supported, both theoretically and empirically, that social costs and benefits may influence the decision of individuals to cooperate and comply with an environmental policy and thus may be a significant indicator for environmental behaviour. Furthermore, these social costs and benefits may differ among individuals and are influenced by social capital elements. Consequently, through the article the need of exploring social capital prior to environmental policy implementation is underlined along with the need of creating social capital assessment techniques.     

On the sustained importance of attitudes toward technological risks and benefits in policy studies

This is a summary of the study by Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, Sarah Lichtenstein, Stephen Read and Barbara Combs, as well as a reflection on why the study has attracted sustained interest since its publication in Policy Sciences in 1978. The article’s contribution to the study of policy approaches to (new) technologies is threefold. First, it drew attention to the importance of public attitudes toward technological risks and benefits. Second, the study has been crucial for the emergence of empirical investigations on decision-making. Third, the types of risks identified by the authors continue to be discussed in contemporary studies. The article demonstrates how issues relating to risk and risky decisions are able to stimulate a truly multi- and even interdisciplinary scientific discourse in which policy sciences play an important role. In terms of policy implications, Fischhoff and his collaborators have compellingly argued that citizens are more likely to accept a technological risk when they realize the benefit of the corresponding technology.     

Pay for Success: Diffusion of Policy Innovation for Social and Economic Stability

Across the United States, communities struggle with numerous social and environmental issues, while the funding to address these issues continues to diminish. Therefore, actors inside and outside of government are seeking new policy solutions to persistent social problems. Significant hurdles to new policies exist, however, including a lack of funding and a reluctance to take on the risks inherent in implementing new programs. A recent innovation in the policy sphere, pay‐for‐success (PFS) financing, has been able to overcome these hurdles. Policy innovation does not come easily, though, and change within government is often slow and methodical. What catalyzes jurisdictions to engage with PFS? By developing an understanding of the mechanisms and processes of PFS, diffusion scholars and practitioners can facilitate innovation within jurisdictions. Such innovation, which the federal government has an opportunity to facilitate, is necessary to shift business‐as‐usual service provision and enable greater social, environmental, and economic stability.     

Electoral competition and the welfare state

The article investigates how parties compete over the welfare state by emphasising specific welfare state issues. The core argument is that two issue-specific factors determine how much parties emphasise individual welfare state issues: the character of policy problems related to the policy issues and the type of social risks involved. To test the argument, a new large-N dataset is employed, with election manifestos from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The dataset contains information on how much parties have talked about health care, education, and labour market protection in national elections since 1980. With the data at hand, it is possible to provide the first systematic investigation of how parties compete for votes over the welfare state. The approach here is able to explain the empirical fact that health care is consistently receiving increased attention everywhere, while particularly labour market protection has witnessed a decline in attention.     

Information disclosure policy: Do state data processing efforts help more than the information disclosure itself?

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) was expected to reduce health risks stemming from emissions of hazardous chemicals by increasing public pressure on polluters. However, raw TRI data fails to transmit accurate information fitted to the public's interest. TRI is a massive and complex data set that, in its raw form, provides information on the pounds of toxics released, rather than the risks these releases pose to human health, which is the true quantity of interest. Consequently, raw TRI data needs to be refined and interpreted in terms of health risks by its users, which requires analytical sophistication and substantial data processing. State governments have attempted to increase of the usefulness of the TRI to the general public via two types of policies: (1) selection and dissemination of raw TRI data for plants within the state, and (2) data processing activities producing more refined reports and further data analysis. This study assesses the effectiveness of those two policies, asking how much each contributes to the intended policy outcome of reducing health risks. Our results show that state‐level data dissemination efforts lowered the total number of pounds of chemicals released, but had little effect on health risks. State‐level data processing efforts, in contrast, did lead to significant reductions in health risks. We conclude that simple dissemination of the data was ineffective (and even counterproductive in some instances), and that the states' data processing efforts have played a critical role in achieving the TRI's intended policy goal by providing better information to end users. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Toward a stakeholder-based policy process: An application of the social marketing perspective to environmental policy development

This article suggests that the application of social marketing principles to the public policy process can facilitate the efforts of governmental policy-makers and non-governmental stakeholders to articulate their policy desires and to encourage the adoption and acceptance of particular environmental policies. A conceptual framework is presented, emphasizing both the influence of stakeholders on environmental policy development and the education of stakeholders as to the potential effects of the policy. The purpose of such a conceptualization is to show how social marketing principles can be applied to the public policy process in order to enhance the likelihood of successful policy development and implementation.     

Money and Mandates: The Politics of Intergovernmental Conflict

The federal government's relationship with the states dependsin part on the level of federal aid and the number of federalmandates. Environmental policy, with less federal aid and moremandates, differs from education policy and health policy. Thevolume of intergovernmental litigation is heavier and rhetoricalreferences to intergovernmental partnerships by agency headsare more common in environmental policy. Waivers are more commonin education policy and health policy, but that appears to bea function of congressional policies largely barring environmentalpolicy waivers. Federal judges are more supportive of the federalgovernment's position on environmental protection and educationthan its position on health care. Overall, federal funding andmandates appear to have an impact on state governments, federalbureaucrats, and federal judges.     

Public Services after Austerity: Zombies,Suez or Collaboration?

Public services—in the UK and elsewhere—are under considerable pressure, not just from austerity, but also from a variety of social, demographic and technological changes (in effect ‘austerity plus’). In this context, three broad options are open to policy‐makers: continue with tried‐and‐tested approaches while spending less money, which in the UK means a reliance on ‘New Public Management’ (NPM); withdraw completely from certain public services; or develop new approaches to public administration. We argue that all of these approaches have been attempted in recent years, but it is the final option that is most interesting and potentially the most beneficial. In this article, we examine experiments with these new approaches in responding to ‘austerity plus’. In particular, we examine various attempts at ‘collaboration’ in public services and discuss the risks associated with them. We conclude by setting out the extent to which policy‐makers have moved beyond NPM and suggesting some of the benefits that this could bring.     

ENERGY FLOW IN AUSTRALIA: MATCHING NEEDS AND SUPPLIES*

Abstract: Energy flow and transformation, being a fundamental driving force behind organization, should be subject to long term government policy. A pre-requisite for formulating energy policy is detailed knowledge of the dynamics and thermodynamics of energy supply and utilization. The lack of coherent policy in the past has led to the development of a society which is physically, institutionally and psychologically locked into an unsustainable liquid fuel consumption pattern requiring not only high but also growing consumption. An expression of this situation is the widespread assumption that coal and nuclear energy are the only significant realistic longer term options for the future, even though these would involve unproven technology and considerable environmental and social risks. The other long term option—the diffuse energy option based on widely distributed, renewable energy sources such as wind and the sun—is generally regarded as unrealistic. This is a social judgement determined more by the inertia of existing institutions and perceptions of our needs than by technical reality. It is possible however, that the measures which might be taken to deal with the crisis of oil depletion in the next couple of decades may swing community structure and attitude and bureaucratic organization into a conservation-minded pattern in which the long term option based on low, stable consumption, diffuse energy sources and decentralized conversion systems seems as realistic to policy makers as the other extreme—the centralized, nuclear-electric, growth society. This flexibility could only emerge, however, if energy research expenditure is diversified very soon.     

Risk assessment in the policy-making process: environmental health and safety protection

This article examines the extent to which differences exist in the relative degree of discretion permitted by the statutory mandates under which health risk assessments are conducted as a basis for regulatory action. Attention is focused on the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, because they are the lead federal regulatory agencies on most environmental health matters. The statutes are found to define risk, consider effects, identify target populations, and use benefit-cost analysis in a flexible way. But the burden of proof of risk typically is assigned in a more direct and stringent fashion. Overall, however, agencies are found to have substantial discretion in the manner in which risk assessments are incorporated into the policy process. A number of examples of efforts to reduce this flexibility are outlined and their implications for the future of the analysis of risks are delineated.     

Connecting social and environmental policy in Australia: Collateral gains or collateral damage?

Climate change research relating to “co‐benefits” suggests that the facilitation of social‐welfare outcomes through environmental policy offers a powerful means of incentivising climate change action. Concerns about social‐welfare, however, are often used to undermine climate change policies, typically through political claims that low‐to‐middle‐income households should not shoulder the costs of greater policy alignment between social and environmental objectives. Integrating the social into the environmental can therefore, on the one hand, lead to “co‐benefits” as each agenda promotes the other in political discourse, or alternatively to collateral damage if the policy objectives are framed as incompatible. This article explores both scenarios through two case studies of energy policy in Australia. The findings show that social‐welfare concerns can be a powerful discursive tool with the potential to facilitate political consensus, but also that this potential is not being fully realised, primarily because environmental concerns suffer when attempts are made to integrate the two areas discursively.     

Revisiting the governance of privacy: Contemporary policy instruments in global perspective

The repertoire of policy instruments within a particular policy sector varies by jurisdiction; some “tools of government” are associated with particular administrative and regulatory traditions and political cultures. It is less clear how the instruments associated with a particular policy sector may change over time, as economic, social, and technological conditions evolve. In the early 2000s, we surveyed and analyzed the global repertoire of policy instruments deployed to protect personal data. In this article, we explore how those instruments have changed as a result of 15 years of social, economic and technological transformations, during which the issue has assumed a far higher global profile, as one of the central policy questions associated with modern networked communications. We review the contemporary range of transnational, regulatory, self‐regulatory, and technical instruments according to the same framework, and conclude that the types of policy instrument have remained relatively stable, even though they are now deployed on a global scale. While the labels remain the same, however, the conceptual foundations for their legitimation and justification are shifting as greater emphases on accountability, risk, ethics, and the social/political value of privacy have gained purchase. Our analysis demonstrates both continuity and change within the governance of privacy, and displays how we would have tackled the same research project today. As a broader case study of regulation, it highlights the importance of going beyond technical and instrumental labels. Change or stability of policy instruments does not take place in isolation from the wider conceptualizations that shape their meaning, purpose, and effect.     

Downbound spiral? Economic grievances,perceived social protection and political distrust

Abstract

Momentous events in Western democracies have brought renewed attention to how various aspects of government-controlled policy outputs and outcomes affect citizens’ trust in politics. Unlike most previous research, this study uses individual-level panel data to test the link between government performance evaluations and political trust. Moreover, it gauges performance in more policy areas than previous research, including key aspects of government-controlled social services as well as a wide range of economic risks. The study finds that evaluations of government performance affect political trust but that the evidence is stronger for evaluations of social protection than for economic risks. Crucially, the analysis suggests that the relationship between performance evaluations and distrust is reciprocal. The relationship may be described as a ‘downbound spiral’ where dissatisfied groups develop distrust, which in turn makes for a more pessimistic interpretation of economic risks and welfare state performance.     

You gotta move: advancing the debate on the record of dispersal

This paper summarizes the social science research on the record of housing dispersal programs since 1995. The research shows a consistently disappointing record of benefits to low-income households. Households moved out of high-poverty neighborhoods, voluntarily and involuntarily, show few or no beneficial effects in terms of economic self-sufficiency, health benefits, or social integration. The benefits of dispersal are confined to feelings of greater safety and satisfaction with neighborhood environmental conditions. We offer a framework for understanding the disappointing record of dispersal, highlighting its translation from social science diagnosis to policy, problems in the policy's implementation, its underlying theory of poverty, and the political context within which dispersal has been applied.     

Politics of the precautionary principle: assessing actors’ preferences in water protection policy

This paper analyzes the prospects for introducing the precautionary principle in water protection policy. In situations where a problem enters the political agenda and scientific uncertainties remain about causes or effects, political actors can justify state intervention based on the precautionary principle. It allows for public action even if risks related to the problem remain unclear. While the precautionary principle is widely applied in health and environmental policy fields all over the world, the mechanisms leading to its adoption are not fully understood. To close this gap, the paper investigates decision-makers preferences for the precautionary principle and further asks: Which factors promote political actors’ preferences for precautionary policy measures? In order to answer this question we study the case of emerging micropollutants—a water quality issue that recently entered political agendas, where many uncertainties remain about sources and effects. We rely on data gathered through a standardized survey among the political elite in Switzerland, which represents one of the first countries that adopted policy measures to reduce micropollutants in water bodies, despite the uncertainties that remain. Results analyzed through a temporal network autocorrelation model reveal that actors embedded in collaborative governance arrangements have the tendency to prefer precautionary action. Certain aspects of policy design, such as problem prioritization and target group membership, also impact the prospects for introducing the precautionary principle.     

The Grassroots Are Greener: Democratic Participation and Environmental Policies in State Politics

American environmental legislation cannot be fully explained under traditional interest‐group theory, which emphasizes the success of well‐financed, organized interests. One alternative explanation holds that the American public accepts a new environmental ethos that is protective of the natural world and human health. This study examines 100 years of state‐level ballot questions on environmental policy and empirically establishes the emergence and persistence of this new environmental ethos as well as the changing nature of American support for environmental policy. This ethos emerges in 40 years, environmental policy making of this type has been increasingly citizen‐led, inclusive of a wider variety of environmental problems, while embracing a greater range of policy solutions including those premised on more radical notions of humanity?s relationship with the natural world.