Abstract
Environmental policy-making is a human values-based process that relies on the production of scientific data and information and effective facilitation and advocacy. It is always essentially a political process and always involves tradeoffs among objectives and impacts. It is at its heart a design process—a design for human behavior, through governance institutions, for living with a biophysical environment whose ultimate configuration will be determined largely by human values and behavior. This thesis is explored within the general perspective of the “total ecology”—biophysical, human, and institutional—of environmental issues.
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We define “environment” or “ecosystem” as a set of entities which can be characterized and whose relationship with one another can be described.
There are also well-developed literatures in biophysical, human, and institutional ecology.
We also define human-produced physical artifacts, such as buildings, roads, dams, or other alterations in the biophysical environment as part of the biophysical environment.
Since all governance institutions are composed of people, in a sense, the institutional ecology is a subset of the broader human ecology. We separate them to emphasize the public trust aspects of authority and responsibility that are attendant on these institutions. In particular, the assignment of authority over the behavior of others is a unique characteristic of public trust governance institutions. In addition, the assigned structure of authority and responsibility exhibits defined interconnections among these institutions and between those institutions and the people whose behavior they govern.
“Policy,” broadly defined, may also be made by private sector groups or organizations, but such policies are authoritative only in the context of that group or organization, not in the broader society sense of the governance under the public trust concept.
These percentages, of course, will vary from issue to issue.
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Orbach, M.K. A brief essay on the nature of (and in) environmental policy. J Environ Stud Sci (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-014-0170-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-014-0170-3