This edited collection provides a cross-sectional review of environmental legislation and administration in the United States, with comparative chapters relating to Canada and New Zealand. The experts look at a variety of environmental issues that create policy problems, and while the book offers no blueprint or prognosis of environmental policy in the twenty-first century, it does offer insights into trends that will influence the future shape of that policy.

The book is prefaced by an overview of the environment as a problem for policy by Lynton K. Caldwell, who has been credited with inventing the term environmental policy. Experts examine the role of risk analysis in policy making; the transnational issues associated with NAFTA and GATT are discussed; and the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to integrate policy and administration are described. The perspective of the authors is transnational, with several chapters focusing primarily on U.S. policy.

Much of the literature devoted to impact assessment has focused on it as a technique or set of techniques, or on the environmental impact statement as a legal procedural requirement. While there are notable exceptions, the rich theoretical and empirical possibilities for research concerning significant innovations in the way governments operate has not been exhausted. The intention of this new edited collection is to stimulate research on the influence that impact assessment has had on policy making. Bartlett has organized the contributions around the principle that practical effectiveness in the real world of policy-making is determined by the way internal logic and institutionalization redefine policy rationality in a given system. Although impact assessment is defined broadly, the contributors do not focus on the commonalities of the techniques employed. Rather, they explore patterns of institutionalization--the ways that policy is determined through impact assessment. The volume opens with an extensive overview of impact assessment as a policy-making instrument. Other sections are devoted to impact assessment in development planning, future policy directions, and critical perspectives. A comprehensive bibliography completes the work. Building upon several earlier works on impact assessment, this collection combines the insights of pioneering scholars with directions for future research. It is essential reading in the fields of administration, sociology, transportation, business, political science, and urban and policy studies.

This volume from the Policy Studies Organization provides critical, theoretical, and empirical perspectives on international organizations, the policy implications of these organizations, and the possible roles such agencies can play in international environmental policy. With contributions from a wide range of scholars, the work takes up such topical issues as the Rio Agenda of 1992 and its implementation; the role the European Union might play in environmental policy; the place of environmentalism in the development strategies and tactics of organizations such as the World Bank; and the development of international environmental law.

Deliberative democracy is well-suited to the challenges of governing in the Anthropocene. But deliberative democratic practices are only suited to these challenges to the extent that five prerequisites - empoweredness, embeddedness, experimentality, equivocality, and equitableness - are successfully institutionalized. Governance must be: created by those it addresses, applicable equally to all, capable of learning from (and adapting to) experience, rationally grounded, and internalized by those who adopt and experience it. This book analyzes these five major normative principles, pairing each with one of the Earth System Governance Project's analytical problems to provide an in-depth discussion of the minimal conditions for environmental governance that can be truly sustainable. It is ideal for scholars and graduate students in global environmental politics, earth system governance, and international environmental policy. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.

Environmental rights are a category of human rights necessarily central to both democracy and effective earth system governance (any environmental-ecological-sustainable democracy). For any democracy to remain democratic, some aspects must be beyond democracy and must not be allowed to be subjected to any ordinary democratic collective choice processes shy of consensus. Real, established rights constitute a necessary boundary of legitimate everyday democratic practice. We analyze how human rights are made democratically and, in particular, how they can be made with respect to matters environmental, especially matters that have import beyond the confines of the modern nation state.

Deliberative democracy is well-suited to the challenges of governing in the Anthropocene. But deliberative democratic practices are only suited to these challenges to the extent that five prerequisites - empoweredness, embeddedness, experimentality, equivocality, and equitableness - are successfully institutionalized. Governance must be: created by those it addresses, applicable equally to all, capable of learning from (and adapting to) experience, rationally grounded, and internalized by those who adopt and experience it. This book analyzes these five major normative principles, pairing each with one of the Earth System Governance Project's analytical problems to provide an in-depth discussion of the minimal conditions for environmental governance that can be truly sustainable. It is ideal for scholars and graduate students in global environmental politics, earth system governance, and international environmental policy. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.