Kenneth C. Campbell - Urban Environmental Policy Analysis

For a variety of reasons, the city has become a central figure in environmental policy. One reason is a general rise in the importance of cities. Another reason is the growth in global urbanization under way in the early part of the twenty-first century. A third reason, at least in the United States, is because of the new federalism and the abrogation of certain environmental policy responsibilities by the national government, along with failures of many subnational states to step in and fill the gap. Due to the rise of global urbanization, the majority of people worldwide now live in cities; therefore, cities do and will generate a significant portion of human-caused pollution (United ScienceDaily, 2007; Nations Information Service, 2004). For all these reasons, it makes sense to focus on cities in attempts to improve global environmental health. There is an old saying: If you want to hunt ducks, go where the ducks are. When it comes to environmental change, cities are where the ducks are.

Another reason to focus on the local level, as one scholar has argued, is that local governments exist at a level in which there is personal contact between government actors and the regulated parties, which can create powerful social norms; local government, then, may be an ideal arena for environmental control (Flatt, 2007, 2). Significant research in the cooperation literature indicates that personal contact enhances cooperation (Orbell, van de Kragt, and Dawes, 1988; Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner, 1992), and, among governmental units, cities may be most suited to creating personal contacts. Furthermore, cities themselves have chosen to accept significant burdens of environmental policy, as certain endorsements at the 75th annual meeting of U.S. mayors indicate (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2007, for example, 164168).

This book is intended to assist administrators and other decision makers as they focus on the importance of environmental policy within the context of the city. Its aim is to help current and future urban decision makers, administrators, and analysts consider the many and interrelated issues of urban environmental policy, with the goal of improving the quality of both policy and administrative decisions.

The authors do this by:

illustrating a systems-based model of the city that provides a holistic view of environmental media (land, air, and water) and highlights the extent to which environmental policy decisions are intertwined with the Natural, Built, and Social systems of the city;

introducing basic and environment-specific policy-analytic models, methods, and tools;

presenting and discussing specific environmental policy puzzles that will confront cities; and

presenting methods for understanding and educating public opinions around urban environmental policy.

Throughout this book, examples from cities around the world are given to help clarify the relationship between ideas and their application, and to introduce people in one city, region, or country to ideas from others.

This book can help those at higher levels of the decision-making chain, as well. Clearly, supranational-, national- and state-level decision makers need to understand and affect city environmental policy and outcomes. A crucial factor in modern pollution is that the paradigmatic modern environmental harm is anything but local. It is generally trans-boundary harm caused by products or processes in a national or international market, whose profits are far removed from their harms (Flatt, 2007, 4). The concentration of human populations within cities means that there will also be a concentration of environmental harm thereand those same environmental harms will emanate from the affected cities. So, while cities themselves need to work on urban environmental issues, work at all other levels of government is also warranted.

As the history of urban planning explicates, this is not a new situation for cities (see, for example, Daniels, 2009). In the introduction to a special 100th-anniversary issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association, Birch and Silver (2009) point out that, even in the first 1909 meeting of the National Conference on City Planning, the environment was a major concern; later, the passage of national antipollution legislation (for example, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts) similarly resulted from environmental abuses first seen in cities (119). Today, however, cities have become linchpins in sustainability practices.

Fortunately, there is evidence that we may have reached a point where citizens worldwide are prepared to act. As reported by World Public Opinion, a 2007 survey performed by GlobeScan and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) for the BBC World Service asked 22,000 people in 21 countries both industrialized and developingabout their beliefs regarding human activity, climate change, and what should be done to alleviate problems in the future. Large majorities believe that strong action must be taken, sooner rather than later, in developing as well as developed countries. In 13 of 21 [of the] countries [polled], at least twice as many call for major steps starting very soon as those concluding that modest steps over the coming years will suffice (World Public Opinion, 2007). Respondents were residents of Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, South Korea, China, Australia, Philippines, Indonesia, and India, with urbanized individuals the only ones polled in some countries. Perhaps the president of GlobeScan summed up the results best: The strength of these findings makes it difficult to imagine a more supportive public opinion environment for national leaders to commit to climate action (World Public Opinion, 2007).