Abstract
This contribution investigates the strategies that environmental agencies develop to enhance their policy autonomy, in order to fulfil their organisational missions for protecting the environment. This article asks whether there are particular strategic moves that an agency can make to augment this policy autonomy in the face of the principals. Critiquing principal agent theory, it investigates the evolution of three environmental agencies (the European Environment Agency, the England and Wales Environment Agency and the United States Environmental Protection Agency), focusing on the case study of climate change. The contribution examines how the agencies influence environmental policy on domestic, regional and global levels, with a special focus on the principals that constrain agency autonomy. A greater focus on different multi-level contexts, which the three agencies face, may create other possible dynamics and opportunities for agency strategies. Agencies can use particular knowledge, network and alliance building to strengthen their policy/political positions.
Highlights
This contribution has a twofold analytical purpose
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the Environment Agency (EEA) were selected on the most different principle with respect to the question of policy scope within a multi-level context. Both agencies operate in a multi-level dynamic, the USEPA has a substantially greater budgetary and regulatory scope over the United States (US) state-level agencies; in contrast, the EEA is an information-focused agency that relies on networks of national institutions and agencies to perform its policy role and has limited policy/budgetary scope over them
A similar shifting of effort and purpose occurred in energy conservation efforts. These findings suggest that both slippage and dualism occurred, as certain Water objectives set by Congress gave the EPA greater scope to work on climate change (CC) contrary to the wishes of the Executive
Summary
This contribution has a twofold analytical purpose. First, it studies environment agencies as prototypical public organisations wielding policy expertise and struggling with some of the most critical public policy questions affecting human well-being. Politics and Governance, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 1, Pages 73-89 ters This contribution emphasises that a necessarily important part of this governance effort involves developing strategies that engage the agency’s principals and constituencies. Exploring these policy-making aspects suggests the need to conceptually broaden the principalagent (PA) framework. 201) stress how PA theory has overlooked the importance of agent strategies in the policies that ensue This raises the broader theoretical question largely absent from traditional PA approaches, namely assessing the importance of learning. The study adds the Environment Agency for England and Wales (EA) to the methodological approach discussed
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