Understanding Environmental Policy.

Understanding Environmental Policy

Cohen, Steven 2006. New York: Columbia University Press, 240 pages, ISBN 0-231-13536-X (cloth) / 0-231-13537-8 (paper), US $74.50 (cloth), US $26.50 (paper).

Steven Cohen argues that we are limited in our cognitive abilities to comprehend complex environmental issues, so people simplify by applying one or more cognitive lenses originating from their organizational affiliations, academic training, political ideology, or material interests. But simplification often leads to partial--or even distorted--analysis of environmental issues. Cohen responds to this problem by introducing a multidimensional framework to counteract our susceptibility to rely on a single cognitive lens.

The first section of this book describes the multidimensional framework. The framework consists of five dimensions: values, politics, technology and science, policy design and economics, and management. Each dimension represents a single cognitive lens. For example, political scientists might focus on politics as the fundamental cause of an environmental problem whereas an economist might focus on market failure or the lack of proper incentives. Within each dimension, Cohen lists guiding questions to narrow the descriptive focus. As an analytical tool, the framework serves as a handy checklist of dimensions and questions to facilitate problem analysis from multiple perspectives.

The middle section of the book presents an analysis of four case studies to illustrate the usefulness of each dimension in clarifying complex environmental issues. The environmental issues include municipal garbage disposal, gasoline leaks from underground tanks, clean up of toxic waste sites, and global climate change. Each case study is clearly presented with a qualitative description of how each dimension underscores different nuances of the environmental issue and of obstacles that inhibit the development of improved environmental policy.

The concluding section presents a critique of the multidimensional framework and offers suggestions for improving environmental policy. The usefulness of the multidimensional framework is most evident in comparing across environmental policy issues. Interestingly, Cohen shows that some dimensions are more important than others depending on the particular environmental issue. On the one hand, management capacity prevents efforts to fix gasoline leaks from underground storage tanks while politics is not a factor. On the other hand, politics thwarts New York's efforts to improve its approaches to garbage disposal while management capacity is not a factor. Across the four environmental policy issues, Cohen argues that values are probably the most important dimension, especially preferences for a high resource consumptive lifestyle.

The legitimacy of Cohen's framework and the dimensions therein is sup- ported by other theories of policymaking. From Hofferbert's 'Funnel of Causality' to Kingdon's 'Multiple Streams,' existing policy theories have verified the importance of the dimensions in Cohen's framework (Sabatier 1999). Cohen's contribution is how he packages the dimensions in a simple-to-use framework that fits into the toolbox of the typical policy analyst.

An interesting issue that Cohen could have spent more time discussing is the interactive effects among the dimensions. How do changes in public values alter an institutional agenda, shape policy formulation, and affect management in implementation? What is the role of scientific and technical information in designing policy? These are important questions to ask because policy analysts will be hard pressed to make strong descriptive inferences of any environmental policy issue without describing the intersection of Cohen's dimensions.

One of the strengths of the multidimensional framework is that it offers a platform for building theoretical and applied research for improving environmental policy. Additional applications of the framework are needed to investigate the importance of each dimension and the questions therein, to help clarify ambiguity in terms, to weed out the unimportant questions, and to include additional dimensions or questions as needed. The current book would have benefited with a more explicit and deliberate application and discussion of the questions within each dimension. Hopefully, Cohen's multidimensional framework will generate momentum among environmental professionals in this area.

This book is probably most useful for undergraduate or lower level graduate environmental policy courses. It is ideal for structuring student analysis of environmental policy as illustrated in the middle chapters. The book is not too abstract and is accessible to students with diverse backgrounds. Its success outside the classroom depends on the insight it provides to people facing environmental issues to help them take a skeptical look at their cognitive lenses and to look through alternate lenses. In this respect, I expect the book to be successful as well.

References

Sabatier, Paul A. (ed). 1999. Theories of the Policy Process. Boulder, CO: West- view Press.

Reviewed by Christopher M. Weible, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Public Policy, Atlanta, GA