Innovation, learning, and environmental policy: overcoming a plague of uncertainties

Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2000 (523-539)

Innovation, Learning, and Environmental Policy: Overcoming "A Plague of Uncertainties" Hans Th.A. Bressers and Walter A. Rosenbaum

The "Environmental Era" arrived in the United States unanticipated, surprising Congress, the White House, and even the emerging environmental movement as much by its form as by its abruptness. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the first and least anticipated among the many environmental laws that redefined the nation's policy priorities within a decade, was passed on January 1, 1970; it intended nothing less than a reconstruction of national public policymaking. It was, in the words of one of its most influential drafters, "an effort to restate the priorities and responsibilities of government (Caldwell, 1982, p. 28)." Not coincidentally, this first major onslaught of legislative environmentalism was directly aimed at the administrative process.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was created by a small cadre of environmentalists drawn from Congress, private organizations, and academic life who then successfully enlisted, the support of the growing environmental movement to assure its passage. Nonetheless, the NEPA was the first, overt legislative expression of an ideological priority inherent in American environmentalism from the inception of the "Environmental Era": to compel more environmentally benign public policy by reconstructing the policymaking process itself (Andrews, 1976; Caldwell, 1982, chap. 1). While this has never been an explicit goal of all national environmental movements, where national regimes elsewhere have seriously accepted environmentalism as a policy priority, substantial procedural changes have usually followed. In the United States, this attention to the design of policymaking itself as much as concern for environmental quality standards dictated an early strategy of persistently pressing for fundamental institutional reform.

It has become increasingly evident, moreover, that a major problem in Western societies-perhaps the most strategic in the design of all environmental policymaking-has been to reconcile the procedural democracy that legitimates public policy with the creation of resources essential for policy effectiveness under conditions of great uncertainty. This symposium focuses upon this uncertainty, and its impact upon the process of making environmental policy, in different Western national contexts.

Uncertainty and Environmental Polics Symposium Themes and Organization

The sweeping transformation of the national policy agenda in the wake of environmentalism also unleashed, in the words of a leading member of the National Academy of Sciences, a "plague of uncertainties" into public policymaking (White, 1993, p. 4). The articles in this symposium illustrate that institutional change and innovation-a form of cultural learning-has become a major national and international governmental response to these uncertainties. To understand the significance of these responses, this introduction begins by

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examining briefly the qualities of uncertainty characteristic of environmental policymaking with particular attention to the interplay of science and politics as a fundamental contributor. Next, we illustrate this interaction in such important aspects of environmental policy as pollution regulation and promotion of “sustainable development.” The introduction concludes with an overview of the symposium articles and a description of their relationship to the theme of learning and innovation in environmental policymaking.

Politics, Science, and Uncertainty Why should the National Academy of Sciences pronounce uncertainty a

“plague” to environmental policymakers? A modern thesaurus lists more than 150 synonyms for “uncertainty” most of which-say “unsure,” “variable,” or “tentative”-could plausibly be applied to any domain of public policy. Uncertainty in some form is, in fact, intrinsic to public policymaking. Still, scholars and policy advocates quite frequently characterize environmental issues to imply that they confront policymakers with a distinctive, perhaps unique, mix of imponderables. Elective officials, beginning with Congress, are usually glad to sidestep environmental disputes when possible, finding them most often perplexing and politically intimidating. And, as the subsequent discussion of the Dutch experience in planning “sustainable development” illustrates, these large uncertainties are not peculiar to the United States.

An explanation begins with scientific uncertainty. Science and politics, an unstable combination in any policy forum, are especially volatile in environmental policymaking. Many of the most formidable difficulties confronting environmental policymakers arise from the pervasive interplay of uncertain science and political judgment at virtually every stage of the policy process. So much of the scientific research essential for resolving policy conflict and for crafting appropriate policy is unavailable, ambiguous, or preliminary that scientific judgment frequently becomes highly contingent and tentative, almost inevitably contentious-so much that a few years ago the National Academy of Engineering was prompted to convene a national symposium specifically to discuss how the scientific and technical indecision and irresolution characteristic of environmental regulation could be ameliorated (Uman, 1993). When, additionally, the policy grounded on this problematic science must also be designed with little, if any, prior experience to guide policy design, foresight becomes especially difficult, and policy inexperience enlarges the unknowns.

Confronting Uncertainty: Three Constructive Responses What seems to render environmental policy uncommonly problematic is

the concatenation of uncertainties generated by the interaction of scientific and policy unknowns, their magnitude, and the historical context in which policymakers confront them. The symposium articles suggest that three constructive solutions, at least, have evolved in response to these uncertainties. First, policymakers have been open to learning and innovation when crafting policy and institutional responses-in effect, have been able to educate themselves through experience. It has become apparent-for example, in the evolution of “emissions trading” as a strategy for regulating regional and international air pollution-that learning and innovation are increasingly important governmental responses to the uncertainties posed by environmental issues. Environmental management has often become an involuntary policy education for officials who learn, frequently by the repeated failure of traditional policy instruments, that

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environmental problems frequently require more creative resolution. Thus, the articles to follow illustrate various ways in which learning and innovation have developed in national and international environmental policymaking in recent decades.

Additionally, decisionmakers now recognize that policy instruments must include opportunities for democratic participation while also providing the resources necessary for effective policy implementation. Meeting the double standard of substantive capability and procedural equity-in effect, achieving both political legitimacy and policy effectiveness-can be daunting when these dual standards seem incompatible. One malaise common to environmental regulation in many nations, for instance, has been chronic obstruction of governmental permitting for hazardous facilities as a result of public involvement in the administrative procedures, an impasse critics often blame on procedural democracy. Moreover, contemporary policy discussions increasingly raise issues, such as sustainable development or the management of high-level nuclear waste, whose resolution will apparently require the dependable implementation of policy and institutional management over literally hundreds or thousands of years-in effect, the development of policy arrangements with which no civilization has yet had any experience (LaPorte & Keller, 1996). The emergence of these conflicting expectations, and their management, will be evident in many of the symposium articles.

Finally, policy innovation continues despite large and pervasive Uncertainties. In the symposium’s opening article, Leslie Thiele concludes his discussion about the impact of environmental ethics of policy with a cautionary admonition: “The laws of ecology inform us of the need for more knowledge and, at the same time, of the uncertainties that will remain despite any growth of knowledge.” Here is a final theme throughout the articles to follow. Dealing with uncertainty involves not only finding solutions through the acquisition of knowledge, policy innovation, institutional redesign or other strategies. It requires a determination of “press ahead” with policymaking despite uncertainty, to avoid the temptation to inertia, or an unfettered retreat into “further study,” when uncertainties inevitably arise in environmental policymaking. The symposium articles suggest that the appropriate response has often been to take action that seems “about right,” to stay on the safe side while still making a creatively affirmative response to the uncertainties involved-to adopt a “precautionary principle” even in the presence of intimidating uncertainty in preference to precluding action when a compelling environmental problem arises.

The Comparative Context The symposium is deliberately framed in a comparative and European

context. Innovative responses to the uncertainties inherent in environmental management have been especially apparent over the last decade among European nations. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and many individual European nations, for instance, have been leaders in developing environmental information systems providing data, such as emissions inventories, chemical use surveys, and waste generation trends, essential for environmental management. Moreover, European nations have become leaders in negotiating bilateral and multilateral treaties concerned with the climate, acidification, water management, and sustainable development. The European Union (EU) and the OECD and their members, especially, have been early

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innovators in negotiating bilateral and multilateral agreements for the control of climate and acidification.

After the first two introductory articles, the following four articles all draw lessons from these experiences of European countries and international organizations with managing of uncertainties. In the article “International Institutions and Social Learning in the Management of Global Environmental Risks,” Peter Haas explains how institutional learning and the activity of epistemic communities have been instrumental in the development of these policies in several different European contexts including, additionally, the work of the United Nations. In a different context, Leann Brown focuses in another article upon the development of institutional learning among EU nations involved in regional water management. In contrast, Martin Janicke and Helge Jorgens examine early aspects of European sustainable development policies by describing in their article the diffusion of “Green Plans” and their impact upon national environmental management among OECD countries. The Netherlands has distinguished itself as an international leader in many aspects of national, regional, and international environmental management. The article ”Institutional and Policy Responses to Uncertainty in Environmental Policy” compares the Dutch and U.S. approach to long-term environmental planning, illuminates important hfferences, and evaluates some of the problems identified by the Dutch experience. This article involves the United States again in the comparison. An important conclusion is that the effectiveness of various institutional and policy responses to uncertainty depends on fine tuning and context. For many of them, a substantial degree of trust and mutual respect between all groups of actors involved is essential. This point is elaborated, concentrating on the American situation, in the articles by Johnson and Scicchitano and Halfacre, Matheny, and Rosenbaum.

Uncertainty and Pollution Regulation The primary wellspring of large uncertainties in pollution regulation is

most often assumed to be science. Certainly the most apparent, if not necessarily most significant, uncertainties associated with environmental policymaking arise from (a) the initially limited scientific and technical foundation supporting environmental regulation and (b) the difficulty in administratively integrating current science with other legal, political, and procedural norms essential to effective regulatory policymaking.

The Problem of Regulatory Science In many respects, the regulatory science supporting environmental

policymaking was initiated by regulation itself and grows concurrently with the regulatory experience. Even so, it is still quite constrained; enormous gaps and ambiguities persist in environmental data that often become evident only as regulatory experience poses new scientific problems. Thus, it is unsurprising that conclusions of the National Academy of Engineering symposium were that environmental policymaking abounds in uncertainties about our understanding of hazards, risks, costs, and benefjts.

“In environmental regulatory affairs,” it observed, “we frequently are confronted with data for which neither the level of precision nor the level of accuracy is particularly high. Physicists may know the value of the speed of light to eight or nine significant digits, but i n

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environmental affairs, we must often deal with uncertainties in the first or at best the second significant digit” (White, 1993, p. 4).

Less frequently recognized is the collateral problem in administratively engineering sound environmental science into the regulatory process, so that the appropriate information is used at the right time for the proper purposes. The NEPA, for instance, was deliberately intended to compel administrators to use sound environmental science and scientific methods as routine practice in the normal administrative process to assure that the environmental impact of administrative decisions-wherever its bureaucratic location-might be identified and evaluated. This confronts administrators, as political scientist David OBrien has perceptively emphasized, with a “trilemma” virtually inherent to making most science-based policy in democratic nations: how to reconcile the competing demands of scientific accuracy, procedural equity, and democratic political norms (OBrien, 1987, p. x). This trilemma becomes most evident in the enforcement of major environmental quality controls such as ambient air quality standards or acceptable human risk exposure at hazardous facility sites. Here, regulatory policymaking follows a familiar scenario: a high publicized dispute erupts among technical experts over the scientific accuracy of the evidence supporting regulatory decisions, usually exacerbated by mobilized stakeholder groups sure to draw public officials into the fray, which is likely to culminate in the judiciary. In the United States, at least, this tendency to judicialize science policy disputes-virtually every major federal environmental regulation-gets its day in court-has itself been a source of considerable uncertainty about the duration, outcome, and impact of environmental regulation.

Climbing the Policy Learning Curve The common tendency to distinguish science as the root source of

uncertainty in environmental policymaking obscures the critical role that time and experience, rather than the vagaries of technical data, can assume in creating the context for environmental management. Environmental management is so contemporary a problem-at least in aspects such as climate policy, many forms of toxic risk analysis, and habitat conservation, for instance-that policymakers are at a very early stage in the policy “learning curve” for which there is often no substitute. When environmental issues‘ are really new-and many have no historical precedent or close analogies-they confront policymakers with a situation roughly similar to the Federal Reserve Board deciding to inhibit inflation by raising its discount rate to Federal Reserve Members with no prior experience concerning the variability in the national economy’s response to such a strategy.

Many environmental regulatory issues appearing to be primarily scientific problems turn out, instead, to be problems in determining which kinds of available technical strategies are administratively or politically feasible; that is, problems in the political management of science. One example would be the ongoing federal experience in setting ambient air quality standards for sulfur oxide emissions under the Clean Air Act for so-called “existing” stationary sources. It has taken more than two decades of experience with electric utilities and other important stationary emission sources to learn that the decision in the early 1970s to allow utilities to meet the new Clean Air Standards by using “tall stacks” was not scientifically efficacious for economic and political reasons, which became apparent only after experience with the tall stacks solution (Portney, 1990, pp. 89- 90).

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A “learning curve” purchased with time is not only essential to prudent environmental policymaking, but the learning curve also involves the sharing and testing of policy strategies between governments within and between nations. Current climate diplomacy offers numerous examples. During the difficult negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol, the international draft treaty signed by over 100 nations in December 1997 to limit global climate warming, the American experience with emissions trading, and its confidence in this approach, was essential in promoting compromises among the signatories that facilitated an eventual agreement. Thomas Gehring’s study of European environmental regimes demonstrates that this sharing of information and experience was also a necessary precondition for the eventual negotiation of international environmental regulatory regimes such as the Montreal Protocol for the protection of stratospheric ozone (Gehrig, 1994). In the European deliberations leading to the adoption of the “Nitrogen Oxides Protocol” to the Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Convention for Europe (LRTAP), states sufficiently far along the regulatory path to have relevant technical data and administrative expertise were essential to the Protocol’s adoption. ”The environmentally concerned states with particular experience acquired an advanced role in respect to the generation and compilation of information, while in a later stage the findings would be approved by experts from all countries participating in the negotiation process” (Gehrig, 1994, p. 159; see also Boehmer-Christian & Skea, 1991, chap. 1). The European creation of a “critical loads” strategy for setting national emission limits on the precursors of acid precipitation, an essential step in the creation and implementation of a European plan for acidification control under the 1978 LRTAP agreement, evolved between 1985 and 1994 as a successful approach in good part because it proved from experience to be politically and economically attractive to the European nation’s signing of the agreement (Jaeger, Cavender-Barnes, Blumhuber, & Loerbroks, 1993). Much of this kind of learning can be called “institutional learning” and evolves, as we shall observe in several articles in this symposium, as a response to the uncertainties posed by inexperience with environmental policymaking.

At a different level, the learning curve also leads to the identification of what Pentagon policy planners call “unk-unks”-the “unknown unknowns” that define where information and experience are needed and which often are revealed only under the pressure of policy planning. A case in point is the U.S. effort to control tropospheric ozone (smog) by regulating volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in urban areas under the Clean Air Act. In initiating ozone controls, the federal government assumed that urban smog was essentially an urban problem caused by local stationary and mobile pollution sources and best regulated by individual state and local governments in the affected areas.

However, this assumption that the precursors of tropospheric ozone originated locally was based solely on experience with smog control in the Los Angeles basin, which turned out to be a poor model scientifically and administratively for smog problems elsewhere in the United States. “In the rest of the country ozone is a regional problem,” note analysts Alex Farrell and Terry Keating, “Northeastern states are actually part of a ‘river of ozone,‘ and southeastern states are part of a ‘rising tide of ozone“‘ (Farrell & Keating, 1998, p. 12) where the problem must be treated on a regional, multistate basis. However, this lesson could not be learned, and the need for better scientific and administrative models for urban smog regulation could not have been discovered, without the initial regulatory effort.

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In essence, any productive learning curve will not only attack known uncertainties but will (and must) uncover new ones that must be confronted on the way to effective policy implementation. Thus, uncertainties known, or revealed, during policy formulation or implementation should not be considered by themselves a sufficient argument against policy initiatives but, rather, should be seen as an essential element in the policy learning curve without which progress is unlikely.

The Problem of Environmental Valuation Environmental valuation has become an increasingly vexing problem in

regulation for which economists have yet no satisfactory answer (Daly, 1991, parts I and 111; Krishnan, Harris, & Goodwin, 1995, part 111). The problem: By which metric shall environmental amenities be measured? As experience with environmental policymaking grows, it becomes increasingly apparent that, whatever its other merits, the traditional forms of benefit cost analysis (BCA) used, or advocated, in regulatory decisionmaking are quite frequently inappropriate to environmental policymaking. This problem, ironically, has become more evident the more regulatory reformers, and Congress, have attempted to compel the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, among others, to prepare formal BCA for proposed environmental regulations. In fact, BCA can be regarded as an example of regulation creating uncertainties in the sense of makmg problematic elements visible by requiring additional information about their economic implications to policymaking.

With environmental policymaking, as Leslie Thiele’s subsequent article amply illustrates, BCA becomes especially difficult not only because monetizing environmental amenities is intrinsically daunting, but because discount rates must assign appropriate value to the interests of future generations in present environmental amenities or necessities. One cannot, for instance, “discount” to the present the future value of wilderness that might be lost to proposed energy exploration today without calculating in some manner how much wilderness-or the continuing availability of abundant fossil fuels or rare minerals or whatever-would be valued by a future generation.

Moreover, discounting was originally conceived in a very Merent theoretical setting where it was applied ‘primarily to the valuation of consumer goods in a market economy. The idea of “sustainability” inherently implies that the prospective needs of a future generation are equal to our own. Ethically, the only discounting that could be defended would have to be defended on the assumption that the specific utilities lost by our use of resources would be replaced at a certain rate by other goods able to fulfill the same functions.

It is the nature of modem environmental issues that they bespeak our technological capability to alter profoundly the basis of life, as well as life’s amenities, for a generation even removed only once from our own. Almost suddenly, such issues raise acutely the challenge of finding a way to represent economically as well as politically and ethically the interests of the unborn for whose welfare we’ have unwittingly become custodians, and whose survival itself we can put at risk, through technological innovation. Although this may not be a new issue philosophically or ethically, it has now become a desktop problem for administrators and will become more so with time.

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Institutional Challenges Government, almost any government, was never conceived for the

institutional management of the environment as we now understand that idea. The idea of governments “declaring” or “managing” climate policy in the ofhanded way in which the international deliberations about global climate warming were described by the world media during the deliberations in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997 would have sounded faintly ridiculous a few decades ago. One of the most challenging aspects of environmental management for virtually all governments has been to adapt institutional processes, designs, and values to our awakened sensibility about environmental management. One virtually universal problem confronting all national governments has been adapting the geographical jurisdiction and powers of existing governmental entities to the cross-scale and cross-institutional character of environmental problems. Another challenge has been to create the appropriate environmental assessments and to integrate them into traditional decisionmaking procedures at all governmental levels.

For democratic governments, one continuing uncertainty has been the comparability of traditional norms of political participation, particularly in the administrative process, with the needs for timely, scientifically accurate environmental regulation (Williams & Matheny, 1995). This problem, unfortunately, has frequently been exacerbated by governmental efforts to improve the technical basis for regulatory decisionmaking. As former EPA Assistant Administrator Terry Davies, Jr., has observed, new technical information often incites political conflict among stakeholders in the affected decisions. “Both the public and private sectors regard new technical information in the context of the capital-political as well as financial-that has been sunk into past decisions, and both may be reluctant to accommodate new information” (Davies, 1993, p. 252). And the venues where these conflicts are thrashed out are, quite frequently, various forums for public involvement in administrative decisionmaking or (in the United States) the courts.

Transfirming Political Cognition The current international controversy over the appropriate governmental

response to predictions of global climate warming illuminates the profound challenge that environmentalism poses to traditional modes of policy thinking in virtually all governments. Global monitoring, computer modeling, basic and applied scientific research, and other techniques for environmental assessment have evolved rapidly in the last two decades concurrently with a global network of “epistemic” communities through which such information is shared and publicized among scientific and technical organizations internationally (Haas, 1992). The result has been a rapidly improving technical capability, and a growing political resolve, among environmental scientists to (a) forecast environmental trends over increasingly longer periods of the future; (b) to construct complex predictive models that may act like sophisticated scientific “trip wires” alerting current policymakers to potentially perilous future environmental consequences of present policies; and (c) to speak in terms of the regional and global interdependence of environmental problems and their solutions.

These trends have become most evident in current international concern about “climate issues“ including not only climate warming but also depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer and control of acidifying precipitation (Andersen, 1997; Bolin, 1994). The preservation of endangered species and their critical habitat, the management of radioactive waste, and energy conservation are less

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obvious examples of these tendencies. The propulsive force behind all these issues is, ultimately, the continuing evolution of technologies capable of transferring the costs of their development-often calculated in severe human health and ecological risks-across centuries or millennia, while their often considerable benefits aggregate over much shorter time periods.

Issues of this kind challenge traditional political thinking in several ways. First, many of the most scientifically plausible strategies for ameliorating these problems compel policymakers to inflict upon their constituencies considerable, very tangible, and immediate economic and other social costs in return for prospective benefits-often apparently problematic-accruing to future generations. Such issues possess scant political allure, particularly in democracies where frequent elections compel officials to be forever mindful that most voters still want to know “What did you do for me lately?” Second, it requires policymakers to concede considerable credibility to scientific and technical expertise usually foreign to their own experience and, perhaps, to trust the accuracy of predictive models and other technical constructs that are themselves a source of considerable scientific dispute. Third, policies based upon the anticipation of projected future economic, health, or ecological costs seem-especially when these future impacts are the primary social costs-to require some social process for the virtual representation of future generations in present policymaking venues. We have implicitly assumed that existing public institutions can be trusted with this responsibility in the context of policy choices that now can have potentially catastrbphic global consequences in the future (Ophuls & Boyan, 1992, part 11).

Finally, the successful implementation of policies to ameliorate existing environmental problems may require the creation of institutions and technologies that do not presently exist. One obvious example is the problem confronting all the major nuclear nations in securely managing the disposal of their high-level and transuranic nuclear wastes. The successful regulation of these wastes now appears to require some institutionally secure arrangement to sequester these wastes for hundreds and possibly thousands of years (Flynn et al., 1995). Alternatively, these wastes might be rescued from entombment for millennia by conversion to more beneficial use through the development of technological processes yet to be discovered. In either case, what will be fequired are new institutional forms, or a problematic technological evolution. These contingencies are quite different from, for instance, the problem posed in managing most hazardous chemical wastes where known technical and institutional strategies exist.

These uncertainties, and others related to environmental policymaking, need not deter public institutions from attacking environmental ills imaginatively nor preclude the development of attractive new technologies, even if they pose serious ecological risks. Indeed, none of these imponderables is necessarily so singular or forbidding as to defy successful resolution. But, like sustainable development, dealing with them successfully will certainly require not only innovative policies but also sometimes profound institutional changes.

Sustainability as a Permanent Challenge The quest for sustainable development poses a great challenge to modern

societies. Even setting aside distinctions between rich and poor countries and restricting the concept to “a degree and form of use of natural resources by the economy that is permanently possible,” this challenge remains enormous. Next

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to protecting the environment, the control of risks and the avoidance of over- exploitation of natural resources are the main subjects of policies that aim at sustainability. Sustainability policies tend to be broader in scope than the first generations of environmental policies, such as air and water pollution regulation, with which we are now familiar.

A policy aiming at sustainability requires an enormously long-term perspective and iterative nature, as is the starting point for most articles in this symposium. It is not enough to protect or improve circumstances during one governmental term in office; one must also give attention to the living conditions for people who will populate our world in 100 years or more.

Because the size of the world population and the activities it undertakes change unremittingly and habitually increase, sustainability as a policy goal cannot be viewed as a spatially or temporally limited objective, but as a direction to be pursued continuously. This essentially defines the main goal of sustainability: stimulating a special kind of permanent social innovation, not merely technological, but also political, economic, and cultural.

Three Pnoblemutic Aspects of Sustainability An environmental policy that aims at a real contribution to the objective

of sustainable development is likely to confront at least three distinctive problems in most of the world:

1. Legitimacy: attempting to reconcile the functional rationality of planning for sustainability with the procedural rationality of a democratic political system may create a dangerous political and cultural dissonance.

2. Steering capacity: striving for big and lasting social changes requires a powerful source of continuing political authority and sustained managerial capability to overcome the tendency to lapse into incrementalism.

3. Policy-relevant information: dealing with the uncertainties inherent in a complex, long-term and moving objective such as sustainability must avoid an impasse created by limited knowledge or experience while also generating needed policy information.

The articles in this symposium focus on the third issue, but it is useful to discuss the others briefly since they form a context for the third. Indeed, the research question central to the whole collection could be phrased as “How can environmental policies succeed in achieving a combination of democracy with legitimacy and adequacy with effectiveness under conditions of great uncertainty?” All papers in this collection deal with aspects of this question. Together they provide a glimpse of an answer, as we will summarize in the concluding chapter.

Legitimacy Typically, various

values are at stake simultaneously, and developments can be evaluated positively or negatively from different perspectives. Often a certain form of balance between basic values is to be preferred (Hoogerwerf, 1995). Bennett (1992) mentions several dilemmas of environmental management, including issues of equality, freedom, and the acceptance of uncertainty. Such goals and motives are rooted in values and these cannot be separated from the perspective from which one evaluates the policies.

A fundamental distinction is judging sustainable development by its results and by its process. This distinction is posed sharply by the classical question of how far the end justifies the means. The distinction can also be

Drastic social policies are seldom right or wrong.

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conceived as a difference between “functional” or “substance” concepts of rationality and “procedural” concepts of rationality (Dryzek, 1987). In an increasing number of nations, all policies-and certainly policies aiming at big changes like sustainable development-now involve the procedural rationality of democratic decisionmaking. This not only entails a whole complex of associated values, but also involves the craft of acquiring broad support for a policy. These latter aspects are sometimes characterized as “political rationality.”

In virtually all Western societies, “economic rationality,” an orientation towards solving problems and satisfying human needs as efficiently as possible, is a dominant functional rationality. This will have to be reconciled with what Lafferty (1996, p. 3) describes as “ecological rationality”-a notion implicit in the concept of sustainability-as a relevant kind of functional rationality. The term ecological rationality means an ecological sensibility that is more than a policy goal or even a value (like “preserving the integrity of the ecosystem” would be). It represents a certain way of thinking about the world with its own logic and a characteristic mode of interpreting the world. That mode includes the acknowledgment that all systems (not only natural ones) are nested in other systems, that system characteristics are more than the sum of the characteristics of the constituent parts, that system qualities evolve in sometimes unpredictable ways, and that a continuous self-regulating mutual adaptation occurs between system parts and their surroundings. From such a perspective, policy formulation should start preferably from an analysis of the stkcture of the policy field and the points of action open for external influence-that this analysis reveals, rather than starting from the eventually intended effects of the policy (cf. Bressers & Ligteringen, 1997).

Of course, policies aiming at sustainability will not only have to reconcile the functional rationalities of economic efficiency and dynamic ecological stability, they must also be compatible with the procedural rationality of democratic decisionmaking. Ultimately, policies aimed at sustainable development will have to merit and acquire legitimacy in most nations through various kinds of democratic processes (see, for instance, the articles by Thiele; Arentsen, Bressers, & O’Toole, Jr.; Johnson & Scicchitano; and Halfacre, Matheny & Rosenbaum in this collection-). This will require a reconciliation of the different, sometimes dissonant qconomic, ecological and democratic rationalities in a manner that concurrently promotes substantively sound policymaking and continuing democratic procedure. This democratic rationality will likely have to encompass a growing diversity of national civic cultures and subcultures. Here the reality and form of democratic decisionmaking both matter. The virtual representation of important stakeholders is not enough. Inevitably, sustainability policies must achieve legitimacy through genuine democratic processes.

Steering Capacity It is no longer fashionable to speak about policy “steering.” One could

be suspected of believing in social development by autocratic central planning. In many European nations, such as the Netherlands, many observers assume that open consultation, from problem definition via policy formulation and implementation to the behavioral changes of target groups, will be prominent in public policymaking. And they are probably correct. But consultation is no alternative for steering. When consultations replace steering completely, the

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crucial importance of power and its distribution in policy implementation is neglected.

In most modern nations, the exercise of political power through policymaking involves more than the assertion of authority by government over nongovernmental entities like industry or other private organizations. The government in a sense is only a judicial fiction. In all policy processes many private organizations and individuals may act as parts of the government as we know at least since Allison (1971). In addition, the public and private spheres are closely interwoven economically and culturally in most societies. In virtually all modern societies, most important groups and interests are likely to have some form of institutional representation within the public sphere. A consequence is that the relevant power relations in society also involve the relations between various governments: various departments, layers of government, portfolios of administrators, and so forth. These power balances differ according to the issue at stake. It is inevitable that aspects of other governmental policies will sometimes threaten severely the achievement of any given environmental policy goal (Ligteringen, 1998). “Interpolicy cooperation” will be a necessary part of environmental policy in order to be effective on the long run (Knoepfel, 1995; see also Janicke and Jorgens in this collection).

The need for steering capacity does not imply governmental coercion in some hierarchical form as the sole mode for sustainable development. The use of exchange in a negotiation-based setting and “market models” to create incentives for public-private cooperation is equally important, but these usually require a substantial exercise of public power to create the conditions for their operation and to assure their continuity over long periods of time. In any case, mixed forms of steering are common and often successful in national environmental planning. A Dutch study by Van de Peppel (1998) discovered that among the 251 Dutch environmental policy instruments studied in 1995, 57% were judicial (direct government regulation), 22% were financial (predominantly subsidies but also other economic incentives), 18% multilateral (negotiated agreements), and 3% communicative (media campaigns and advice).

Significantly, this research revealed that pollution decreases appeared to depend upon two complex factors: the degree of social attention to the issue at stake and the intensity of the policy program involved. Over 90% of the variance in the degree to which 43 emissions (of different substances by different target groups) had been decreased between 1980 and 1995 was about equally explained statistically by the degree of attention in society for the issue and by the intensity of the relevant policy mix. (Intensity was measured according to the force and scope of the measures as judged on the basis of a complete inventory of environmental policy instruments used in the Netherlands between 1970 and 1995). Equally important, social attention seems to have a big influence on environmental behavior apart from observable changes in the substantive policy mix. In fact, it is possible that not only the policy mix itself changes under the influence of social awareness, but also the quality of the policy implementation, perhaps becoming more effective because of an increased social exposure of the target groups. Sustainability policies aim for big impacts at a rather rapid pace, and emissions regulations are only part of such a program. Still, this study suggests that the development of strong social support is a requirement for the steering capacity needed for an effective sustainability policy program. In particular, a strong social base for the exercise of power by individuals and

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institutions that promote sustainability would appear crucially important. Inevitably, sustainability-oriented policymaking means building power bases.

Long-Tern Uncertainty Social awareness about environmental issues is generally extensive, but

rather unstable, even in technologically advanced societies. Many environmental problems, like acidification or the impairment of the ozone layer, are quite remote from ordinary people. These problems are portrayed by mass media on the basis of information from scientific experts. Often this information involves predictions of possible future consequences, like a possible climate change. This makes it possible to postpone attention to several environmental issues for a while, when other societal problems call for immediate attention. It also makes it possible for divergent conceptualizations of the nature and size of the problems to coexist for a long time. Of course, it might be possible to fix long-term policy goals, as done in the Netherlands by their first National Environmental Policy Plan (NEPP) of 1989 (National Environmental Policy Plan, Dutch Government, 1989). But even this offers no dependable solution as one moves beyond the stage of easy improvements and really big sacrifices have to be faced. Often, these sacrifices assume the form of large economic uncertainties rather than known economic costs, although a willingness to face the challenge may create new ways that prove less costly than expected.

The Dutch Scientific Council to the Gavernment unintentionally showed in its 1994 report Sustainable Risks. (Wetenschappelyke Rood voor het Regeringsbeleid (Scientific Council for Government Policy), 1994) what uncertainties about problem definition may produce. The Council elaborated firmly in the first part of the report its position that the NEPP goals were h e d from an exclusively ecological viewpoint. Based on an interpretation of cultural theory (Schwartz & Thompson, 1990; Thomson, Ellis, & Wildavsky, 1990), it proposed four different operationalizations of sustainability as a basis to rethink these goals. This part of the report got a lot of media coverage. The rest of the report is filled with case studies estimating the nature of goals necessary to accommodate these four interpretations of sustainability for several different environmental sectors. What undermines The Council‘s case, however, is that all but one of these case studies show the need for even stricter, not more relaxed,

This example demonstrates the ambiguity that traps even ‘expert bodies‘ when planning for sustainable development. Little wonder that the ordinary citizen, public official, and politician are perplexed or skeptical. Often both politicians and ordinary citizens are unsure whether to ask themselves “Are we

long-term goals. * r

gamblers in a global casino“ (cf. Middeton, 1995) or “Is it true?” (Wildavsky, 1995).

Moreover, the long-term perspective inherent in a policy aiming at sustainability means unending, further uncertainties concerning strategies to deal with the problems. Sustainability policy is by definition never enough, never ready. As long as a population and its economy are growing, the efficiency with which natural resources are used will have to increase. Malthus (1798), who d e c l d 200 years ago that “population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence” (understood as natural resources, mainly sources of nutrition) was neither right nor wrong. He has not yet been proven right but can always prove correct later. He was only partially correct in assuming that the potential uses of

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natural resource were finite. Though nature itself is more or less finite, the ways to use it could develop and have developed enormously.

To deal with such uncertainties, social learning is essential. Policy instruments and environmental policy institutions are not only to be evaluated on the degree to which they contribute to the attainment of certain preconceived objectives, but also on the degree to which they stimulate or facilitate such learning processes. This learning not only includes the domain of technological or policy measures, but even may include our view of the world itself (e.g., Milbrath, 1989). No matter how resilient social institutions may be in undertalung sustainable development, nor how effectively various forms of social learning can be created and institutionalized as experience with such planning evolves, it is the nature of sustainable policymaking to create continually new, and probably increasingly difficult, challenges to existing social institutions a d public policies. Inevitably, sustainability-oriented policymaking is dealing with uncertainty.

Responding To Uncertain* The Sympsium Articles The central question of this symposium is "How can environmental

policies develop that succeed in achieving a combination of democracy and legitimacy, and adequacy and effectiveness under conditions of great uncertainty?" In different ways, all articles address the issue of reconciling democracy with competent environmental management of various ecological problems under conditions of uncertainty. The articles in this symposium explore a variety of national and international responses to the various uncertainties implicit in environmental regulation and sustainable development. In the first article, Leslie Thiele provides a broad philosophical perspective on these responses by discussing how the "imperative of sustainability" and "the precautionary principle" have become dominant ethical norms in the environmentalist approach to the uncertainties imposed by environmental management. He then suggests that these normative attitudes toward uncertainty demand participatory rather than only science-based policy responses.

The following two articles describe various international governmental responses to the problems of adapting regional and global institutions of governance to the new spatial scale of environmental problems revealed by science in the last several decades. Peter Haas examines the institutional and political obstacles to the development of new European responses to tropospheric ozone depletion, acid precipitation, and climate change with emphasis upon how formal international institutions have recognized these problems, developed new techniques for their management, and disseminated this information among themselves. He concludes by assessing the new role of international institutions as "assessors," "teachers," and "learners" in environmental management. Leann Brown discusses the experience of the EU in revising its regional water quality directives to deal with climate warming. She focuses upon the political process, as well as the policy outcomes, that have resulted from efforts to learn new policy responses to cross-national water quality problems and concludes that a valuable learning curve is occurring in the development of these responses, providing evidence that existing EU environmental institutions can incorporate learning as a basic aspect of their design.

The next two articles focus upon different national responses to the uncertainties involved with environmental management, also focusing on their

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value to enhance the necessary learning processes. Martin Janicke and Helge Jorgens, both from the Environmental Policy Research Unit of the Free University of Berlin, discuss strategic environmental planning as a possible way to reduce four major uncertainties in environmental policy: those related to environmental change, future environmental problems, the consequences of environmental policies, and the risk of proactive behavior to policy innovators. It provides an overview and evaluation of this approach among OECD countries and points to the certainty that environmental innovation in production and policy must be continual. In the following article, Maarten Arentsen, Hans Bressers, and Laurence OToole compare how the Netherlands and the United States have attempted to create flexibility and decentralization in institutional design as a way to promote openness, and ultimately, learning. The authors examine how the strategic Dutch economic sectors of agriculture and industry responded to h a d consultation between government and regulated interests in dealing with policy uncertainties. In contrast, the article examines the U.S. reliance upon a mix of different regulatory strategies including not only negotiation but also litigation, comparative risk assessment, and "technology forcing." It concludes that policies relying upon openness and information sharing may often be more effective both in the United States and in the Netherlands, in dealing with the inevitable uncertainties of the new environmental regulation, but that this depends on prerequisites, like a certain degree of mutual trust and openness.

On the basis of the assumption that tnist is needed for an open dialogue and learning, the last two articles examine public differences in how environmental risks are perceived and the priorities the different publics assign to various environmental threats. American political scientists RenCe Johnson and Michael Scicchitano focus upon general public attitudes, while Angela Halfacre, Albert Matheny, and Walter Rosenbaum are Concerned specifically with how ethnic and racial minorities differ among themselves in perceptions of environmental risk. In both articles, the authors are concerned with how government can create appropriate policy responses to the differing character of these public perceptions and what these perceptions imply about governmental effectiveness in dealing with the public's significant role in U.S. environmental policymaking.

In the final article, the symposium editors return to the themes of this introduction and try to summarize the general answer this collection of articles seems to give to our central question. The article concludes with discussing what kinds of new information, research, and vision are necessary to facilitate governmental responses to environmental uncertainties in the near future.

***

Hans Th.A. Bressers is professor of policy studies and environmental policy at the University of Twente, as well as scientific director of the Center for Clean Technology and Environmental Policy (CSTM) of that university. Currently, he chairs the Advisory Committee to the Dutch Minister for the Environment for the implementation of environmental policy by local government, and he serves as an independent scientific member of the Commission on Sustainable Development of the Dutch Socio-Economic Council (SER). He has published widely on policy mapping, instruments, implementation, evaluation, and policy networks, particularly with respect to environmental policies.

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Walter A. Rosenbaum is professor of political science at the University of Florida, where he specializes in environmental and energy policy. He has served as a senior analyst in the Office of the Assistant Administrator for Policy Planning and Evaluation at. the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Innovation, learning, and environmental policy: overcoming a plague of uncertainties

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