Misplaced Distrust: Policy Networks and the Environment in France, the United States, and Canada

Abstract

Eric MontpetitVancouver: UBC Press, 2003. xii, 154pp, $75.00 cloth (ISBN 0-7748-0908-6), $24.95 paper (ISBN 0-7748-0909-4, July 2004)Cynicism about government and the civil service has been deeply rooted in the public mind for so long that it is now cliche. We hardly need to read another op-ed piece or book decrying wasteful bureaucracies, corrupt politicians or self-serving interest groups. Every possible argument in this line has already been made. For this reason it is refreshing to encounter a book that makes precisely the opposite case: citizens in the west should have more faith in their governments, not less.Eric Montpetit bases this claim on purely pragmatic reasoning. Popular cynicism would be justified if the process of governance produced bad policy. But in fact, he argues, government--working in conjunction with civil society--makes good policy decisions more often than not. It is easy, but incorrect, to complain about how badly we are governed.Rather than examining governance in general across the G7, Montpetit focuses on agro-environmental policy in France, the US and Canada. He devises a theoretical framework for measuring the quality of policy and uses it to evaluate the empirical evidence from these three countries. In the process of building this framework, he dismisses some popular methods of judging policy. It is insufficient simply to ask citizens whether they are satisfied with a given decision; popularity alone is not a good measure of policy. Similarly, he claims, it is not possible in every case to gauge the success of a policy by its results. It is often difficult to establish a definite casual link between, say, banning certain pollutants and improved water quality, or between changing the tax code and economic growth. Since neither of these more obvious methods provides the certainty that social science demands, Montpetit is left with a second-best approach to evaluating policy. According to this reasoning, a good policy is one which addresses the concerns of the relevant group of public sector and civil society experts. In the specific case of agriculture and the environment, this means targeting agricultural pollution, requiring changes in farmers' behaviour, addressing a range of farming practices and taking into account the economic impact of the proposed changes. Given this logic, one can only conclude that the actual consequences of a policy--whether good or bad--are irrelevant to its quality. …