Anthem EnviroExperts

Reviewed by Gregg Macey, Brooklyn Law School

David Hess delves into the politics and economics of the transition towards green energy and the development of a green workforce in the U.S.

Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy: Making and Keeping New Industries in the United States, by David Hess, The MIT Press, 2012, 304 pp.

In Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy (MIT Press, 2012), David Hess moves beyond the stale dichotomies of climate change response, such as mitigation vs. adaptation and market- vs. standards-based policies. The 111th Congress was our most dramatic attempt to enact a market-based solution to climate change. In the wake of H.R. 2454, S. 1733, and other dead bills, the Obama administration marshaled its existing executive authority, such as section 111 of the Clean Air Act, to adopt performance standards for stationary sources of carbon emissions. Hess offers a more nuanced approach to the congressional term and its crisis of leadership. He views it as a moment along a broader transition from a carbon-based economy. Good Green Jobs examines the unevenness of this “green transition,” how it leads to weaknesses in our industrial policy, and the prospects for bending the direction that the transition will take.

As a sociologist, Hess explores the transition with tools that are familiar to students of social movement theory: cultural frames, resource mobilization, and political opportunities. His past works share a concern for political opportunity structures used by locally owned organizations (Localist Movements in a Global Economy) and civil society groups aligned against harmful or risky technologies (Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry).  Good Green Jobs continues this focus, and at a particular level of analysis: social fields, and the definitional and object conflicts that happen within them. With qualitative data (interviews, observation of conference meetings, and surveys of industry reports) and statistical modeling (to explain variation in green transition policies), Hess locates the battle against climate change in cultural shifts at different levels of governance. These changes underlie the birth of a “developmentalist” ideology, which defends domestic industry through a mix of industrial policy and the remedy of unfair trade practices. This is the landscape in which our response to climate change takes shape.

Approaching climate change as a social movement challenge rather than a generic collective action problem yields substantial insights. Hess’s distinct form of field analysis isolates the “political ideologies associated with different types of policy interventions.” Change occurs at different scales (“organizational and urban scale to national or international”) in a social field, and by focusing on institutional change, Hess pivots from sociology’s preoccupation with how fields are reproduced. Hess uses these innovations to offer a roadmap for reform. He explains the green energy transition as an uneven selection of “demand” (e.g., cap-and-trade, renewable electricity standards) and “supply” (e.g., research and development, tax credits and subsidies, regional cluster development) policies. He surveys the role of coalitions in framing green development in each policy field, robust descriptive work that reveals constituencies that promote supply and regional demand policies, such as those found in California’s AB 32. He finds important variation across policy fields and scales of governance. The result is an account of the green transition’s political opportunity structures, and our slow, yet surprisingly robust transition from a carbon-based economy. Hess also suggests that we have entered a new generation of environmental policy, where sustainability and developmentalist design tools will predominate instead of market, command, or informational approaches. His multilevel study of policy fields, their shaping by localist and regional efforts, and the impact of systemic shocks such as funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, explodes the usual boundaries of environmental federalism. Stale fights over the benefits of state versus federal regulation, at times waged with little analytic backing, would benefit from Hess’s urgent and more complete analysis.

Reviewed by Alexis Schulman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In this book, Judith A. Layzer analyzes seven prominent Ecosystem-based management (EBM) initiatives to determine if EBM delivers the benefits its supporters promise.

Natural Experiments: Ecosystem-Based Management and the Environment by Judith A. Layzer, MIT Press, 2008, 384 pp.

Although the sweeping environmental statutes passed in the 1960s and 1970s produced substantial improvements in US environmental quality, over the years these laws have also been assailed as too top-down, homogenous, and inflexible. Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has found favor among industry critics, as well as scientists, policymakers, and environmentalists, as a panacea to the failings of the conventional, “command and control” approach to regulation. EBM rests on three core principles: the domain of management ought to be defined by ecological, not political, boundaries; stakeholders, those impacted by management decisions, need to be included in decision-making processes; and management rules should adapt over time to changing local conditions. EBM cheerleaders argue that this approach will yield improved environmental health, while protecting other social interests, reducing conflicts, and producing lasting decisions.

But does it?

In Natural Experiments, Judith A. Layzer examines the efficacy of EBM in practice by analyzing seven of the most prominent EBM initiatives in the US, including the Everglades Restoration Plan and the California Bay-Delta Program (CALFED). Lazyer is primarily interested in testing the proposition that EBM improves environmental outcomes, above and beyond what would be expected under the status quo. Methodologically, such an evaluation presents enormous challenges, including the demands of extensive counterfactual analysis across cases that vary greatly. It is not, therefore, surprising that her work is one of very few to address this critical question with any analytical rigor. Applying a multi-pronged qualitative analysis, replete with exceedingly detailed case studies and process tracing, Layzer’s most significant result lends support to EBM skeptics. She finds the collaborative dictum, in particular, “perpetuates, rather than mitigates, the existing power imbalance,” resulting in less protective management plans and poorer environmental outcomes. Instead political leadership—specifically a willingness to prioritize environmental protection over other interests—exerted within the “conventional political framework,” resulted in the greatest environmental gains.

Advocates of collaborative management may rightly argue that process design is critical, and these cases stray far from the ideal set out in the literature. Nonetheless, the question remains: given the failures of the collaborative efforts Layzer assesses, is collaborative environmental management practical for the scale and complexity of the environmental challenges we face? Or is EBM better off without it?

Reviewed by Lawrence Susskind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Water, Ecosystems and Society: A Confluence of Disciplines by Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, Sage, 2009 (2nd ed.), 212 pp.

Jayanta Bandyopadhyay was the head of the Centre for Development and Environment Policy at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. He has also been the President of the Indian Society for Ecological Economics, and held other academic and policy-making roles during his 35 year career as a senior water professional. In his recent book, he makes a strong case for changing the way water is managed in India, urging that basic ecosystem services be protected even as increasing amounts of fresh water are extracted from rivers and streams to meet growing agricultural, industrial and residential needs. It will not be easy to move away from the long-standing paradigm that puts development needs first.

His initial premise is that additional disciplinary diversity is crucial to generating the knowledge needed to achieve a better balance between human requirements and natural ecosystem needs. He is firmly convinced a new water systems management paradigm (that will take on-going ecological sustainability more seriously) will require a shift in the way economic analysis is used to value water and ecological services. Whether traditional economists will cooperate is unclear.

Dr. Bandyopadhyay devotes special attention to the river-link project developed by India’s National Water Development Agency. He names this the largest civil engineering project in the world. A more complete interdisciplinary analysis, and a more open scientific dialogue, he believes, would raise doubts about the social desirability and the ecological sustainability of the project. Moreover, it is not likely, he believes, to achieve the flood control objectives its proponents have in mind. Although Water, Ecosystems and Society is a small book, it raises large questions in a very compelling way.

The disconnect between water systems knowledge and water resource development is certainly not limited to India. And, interdisciplinary efforts to fill gaps in our eco-hydrological understanding of groundwater and surface water dynamics, as well as ways that the ecosystem services provided by water resources should be valued, ought to be at the top of our global research agenda. I would also agree that we need a much a clearer understanding of the ecological effects of extreme events like flooding, draught, and climate change, before the paradigm shift that Dr. Bandyopadhyay and others are advocating can succeed.

Reviewed by Nicholas Marantz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Collaborative Governance: Private Roles for Public Goals in Turbulent Times, by John D. Donahue and Richard J. Zeckhauser, Princeton University Press, 305pp

In recent decades, U.S. government has relied increasingly on private corporations (including non-profits) to provide an array of services. John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser call this phenomenon “collaborative governance,” and their book describes strategies to increase the public benefits from such arrangements. Donahue and Zeckhauser present over a dozen cases of collaborative governance in action, in domains ranging from education to national security. They explain how administrators can determine when to delegate tasks to private organizations, how to assess potential collaborators, and how to evaluate ongoing projects. But, while Donahue and Zeckhauser provide much clear technical guidance for government officials and concerned citizens, their evidence suggests that collaborative governance may be inherently upwardly distributive, an issue which they do not clearly address.

Donahue and Zeckhauser contend that, among other advantages, collaborative governance can increase public benefits by inducing private actors to commit additional resources. To illustrate this potential, the authors invoke examples from three New York City parks. While these collaborations all resulted in the commitment of additional funds and talent, they also entailed the upward distribution of public resources. In the case of Central Park, Donahue and Zeckhauser note that collaboration has produced “an upscale tilt to the park’s image, amenities, and regulations.” Bryant Park “represents a relatively large investment of public funds to create an asset with quite focused private benefits.” Private investment in Harlem’s Swindler Cove Park yielded a $3 million dollar boathouse, used mostly by rowers who live far from the surrounding disadvantaged community.

The authors acknowledge these distributive consequences without addressing whether they are intrinsic to “collaboration for resources,” as they term the relevant arrangements. Given the consistency of their evidence, the question merits attention. Collaborative Governance would have been more successful if Donahue and Zeckhauser had addressed this possibility with the same zeal and insight that they bring to other aspects of their topic.

Reviewed by Mahdu Dutter-Kohler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation, by Mark Pelling, Routledge, 203pp

In this work, Mark Pelling goes beyond mere examination of the often-myopic defensive strategies to combating climate change in order to understand how human development is being shaped by its impacts. Embedded in a comprehensive socio-political analysis, Pelling’s work examines the interrelationships among the political and cultural norms of a society and its adaptation efforts. Drawing upon a range of perspectives, from organizations to urban governance to state politics, Pelling argues that in order to make significant reductions in human vulnerabilities to environmental risks, we first and foremost must understand the multifaceted social dimensions of climate change.

The book offers a flexible yet robust framework, anchored in what Pelling describes as the “the three visions of adaptation,” which serves as a useful backdrop within which adaptation options can be more comprehensively evaluated. These “visions”—resilience, transition and transformation—differ in their “levels of engagement with specific social systems.” In his explication, resilience corresponds to the most limited of the categories of adaptive actions, while transition, likewise incremental in nature, refers to a situation in which the engagement of the governance regimes has the intent of assuming “full rights and responsibilities” for action “rather than making changes in the regime.” He positions transformation, which he describes as the “deepest level of engagement,” in socio-political, economic, cultural, and developmental discourses; this vision comprehensively addresses overall security and risk related to climate change.

One of the most useful contributions of this book is its take on the new thematic strain, coined as “transformational adaptation,” which has recently emerged in the climate change literature. Transformational adaptation until now has best been viewed as a meta-theory rather than as a set of concrete guidelines for the planning of climate change adaptation. Pelling examines the practical utility of the approach to further this idea. He argues that, for lasting and truly effective climate adaptation to occur, it has to be implemented across geographic and causal lines; piecemeal, localized efforts are thus ineffectual in the longer run. This approach to “adaptation at scale” rests on the premise that, in order to make a palpable difference in situations of grave vulnerability, rapid, systemic, broad-based actions are required to produce significant amelioration of the effects of climate change.

Pelling’s book provides a comprehensive overview of the existing adaptation frameworks and their theoretical underpinnings while attempting to explicate the gaps among them. Through a series of in-depth hypothetical and empirical examples, supported by three detailed case-study chapters, Dr. Pelling analyzes a range of adaptive actions across different scales, from grassroots farmers’ movements to national policies, both in the developed and developing contexts.  In his conclusions, Pelling proposes useful methods for applying his framework in practice and identifies specific sites and levels of intervention for adaptive action contingent upon the social contexts. Pelling’s work represents a compelling contribution to the discourse surrounding the cultural, social, and political environment within which climate change adaptation occurs, while also offering useful insights for practitioners.