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| Andy Hultquist http://business.und.edu/political-science-public-administration |
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| Robert Wood http://business.und.edu/political-science-public-administration |
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| Rebecca Romsdahl http://essp.und.edu |
One of the most fascinating puzzles associated with climate
change policies in the United States over the past two decades has been the
emergence of states and cities as policy leaders. In developing policy approaches to many
previous environmental concerns such as clean air and water, species
protection, and the clean-up of hazardous waste, the federal government took
the lead by establishing regulatory standards and guidelines that shaped
subsequent city and state responses.
Sub-national governments could certainly adopt their own policies that
went beyond these standards, but this tended to be atypical in practice.
Not
surprisingly, initial models for addressing global climate change also favored
a national top-down model. In this case,
the approach was based on two previous successes: the permit-based system
developed to address acid rain and the international treaty structure that was
used to address ozone depletion. In
contrast to these earlier examples however, the issue of global climate change
has become highly politicized in the United States, and this fact has
substantially limited the pursuit of the sort of Congressionally led, top-down
approach that was used for previous issues.
