Federalism and Entrepreneurship: Explaining American and Canadian Innovation in Pollution Prevention and Regulatory Integration

Conventional wisdom provides an increasingly strong endorsement of far-reaching decentralization and delegation of aufhority to bureaucratic agents as the most likely mechanisms to attain such central environmental policy goals as pollution prevention, cross-media regulatory integration, and development of reliable measures of environmental outcomes. Canada would appear an unusually fertile context for such innovation, given its far-reaching deference to individual provinces and their environment ministries in environmental policy. Comparative analysis of select subnational governments in Canada and the United States suggests that the states in general are far ahead of their provincial counterparts in most of these areas of innovation. Despite all the opprobrium heaped on the American environmental policy system, a combination of federal policy tools and state policy entrepreneurship appear to contribute directly to this innovation in some states and are almost completely absent in the Canadian system. These findings suggest a need for careful study of the mix of intergovernmental policy tools and principal-agent relations most likely to realize desired environmental policy goals.