Consensual Environmental Institutions : All Talk and No Action ?

Consensual institutions that attempt to build cooperation between conflicting stakeholders are seen as a potential remedy to the pathologies of conventional environmental policy. However, few analyses have demonstrated that consensual institutions actually increase levels of cooperation, and critics accuse consensual institutions of all talk and no action. In this paper I use a quasi-experimental design to compare the levels of consensus and cooperation in coastal watersheds with and without U.S. EPA’s National Estuary Programs, one of the most prominent national examples of consensual institutions in the environmental policy domain. Using panel survey data from over 800 respondents, I show that while the level of consensus is higher in NEP estuaries, there is no difference between NEP and non-NEP estuaries in the level of cooperation. I conclude that Murray Edelman’s concept of symbolic policy may be a useful theoretical tool for understanding this disjuncture between consensus and cooperation. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 25-28, 2002. Research supported by NSF grants #SBR9729505 and #SBR9815473. Consensual Environmental Institutions: All Talk and No Action? Beginning in the early 1980s with the emergence of negotiated rulemaking (Langbein and Kerwin 2000; Coglianese 1997) and ecosystem management (Yaffee et. al. 1997) as prominent methods of decision-making, environmental policy has witnessed a flood of policy innovations that can be broadly defined as “consensual” institutions. The hallmark of consensual institutions is an attempt to encourage consensus and cooperation among the multiple actors with some political, economic, or administrative stake in policy outcomes. Consensual institutions emerged from dissatisfaction with the adversarial, command-and-control style of governance embodied by conventional environmental policies, which have left many environmental problems unresolved while at the same time inflaming large amounts of costly legal and administrative conflict (Fiorino 1999; Kagan 1999). Consensual institutions of some type are now operating in almost every federal agency and many state agencies involved with environmental policy, as well as agencies dealing with other policy issues. Yet, there is still hot debate about the ability of consensual institutions to actually build consensus, encourage cooperative behavior, and improve environmental outcomes (Kenney 2000b). Some studies hail consensual institutions as the answer to many of the pathologies of adversarial policy (John 1994; Marsh and Lallas 1994; Weber 1999). Others argue consensual institutions are at best a passing administrative fad, and at worst guilty of all talk and no action: the consensual process leads to favorable changes in attitudes and social relationships, without the subsequent behavioral changes in levels of cooperation that are necessary to improve environmental outcomes (Kenney 2000a, b). If process is the product, then consensual institutions may actually do more harm than good by creating perceptions of progress in the absence of any real change, thereby reducing the expressed political demand for consensual institutions without addressing the environmental and social conditions that generated the demand. Take for example the research of one prominent species of consensual institutions, negotiated rulemaking. Negotiated rulemaking, by providing a forum for building consensus between competing interest groups, is designed to reduce the conflict and delays of the conventional notice-and-comment rulemaking process as established by the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. Langbein and Kerwin’s (2000) comparison of negotiated and