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Schroeder, Christopher H. --- "Public Choice and Environmental Policy" [2010] ELECD 321; in Farber, A. Daniel; O’Connell, Joseph Anne (eds), "Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law

Editor(s): Farber, A. Daniel; O’Connell, Joseph Anne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847206749

Section: Chapter 14

Section Title: Public Choice and Environmental Policy

Author(s): Schroeder, Christopher H.

Number of pages: 37

Extract:

14 Public choice and environmental policy
Christopher H. Schroeder1


I. Introduction: public choice and environmental policy
This chapter reviews the contributions that public choice research and scholarship have
made to our understanding of the decisions of governments responding to environ-
mental issues. The literature examined concentrates on domestic policy making within
the United States, although occasional reference is made to the growing literature that
studies European and international decision making. Much of this literature is theoreti-
cal, while a growing portion of it is descriptive. At the same time, public choice analy-
ses are routinely invoked in discussions about the appropriate role of government in
addressing environmental problems, where the implications of this literature takes on
normative implications as well. This chapter considers the theoretical, the descriptive
and the normative dimensions of the literature.
A portion of the public choice literature, especially some of its influential early work,
depicts government as a system in which all participants ignore welfare-improving
actions in favor of ones that advance their own narrow self-interests, and where par-
ticipants representing economically powerful special interests predominate. The results
are government decisions that routinely benefit industry and concentrated wealth at the
expense of broad citizen concerns about environmental quality. The normative implica-
tion seems clear: anyone concerned with the public interest or simply opposed to being
victimized by the self-interested motives of someone else ought to avoid putting impor-
tant environmental decisions in the hands of such a system, if possible.
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