Institutional Analysis of a Failure of Cooperative Environmental Federalism: Why States Struggle to Adopt Rapid Wetland Assessment Tools

Abstract

The integration of best available science into environmental policy is frequently considered a priority by scientists, policymakers, and scholars. These actors often puzzle over the fact that such integration is difficult and often does not occur despite substantial effort to achieve it. This paper uses institutional analysis to understood the roots of such an integration failure. Five Mid-Atlantic states have been struggling for years to adopt rapid wetland assessment tools, a class of science policy innovations, into their wetland regulatory programs. Their struggles are the product of incomplete and contradictory pressures on state policy by exerted two federal agencies whose substantial power over states, and conflict with each other, is set up by the structures of the Clean Water Act and cooperative environmental federalism. The perverse incentives, constraints, and path dependencies at play in the implementation scenarios described in the paper both stymie state tool adoption efforts and lead each federal agency to try to use states as instruments for imposing its priorities on the other. Incoherent, conflicted federal-level influences actually give typically subordinate states the opportunity to pressure federal actors into accepting the science policy innovation at issue, but few states seize this leverage.

Keywords: wetlands, environmental federalism, environmental policy, policy adoption, policy innovation, institutional analysis, Clean Water Act