This essay is part of a Symposium entitled American Regulatory Policy: Have We Found A Third Way? It examines the relationship between two recent and important political and policy developments. The first is the debate in the United States, Great Britain and Europe over whether we can develop a successful alternative to forms of democratic socialism on the one hand and forms of neoliberal laissez-faire capitalism on the other. The second is the Clinton/Gore administration?s environmental initiative, featuring programs to increase local control of program administration, deepen public participation, allow compliance flexibility, and better inform citizens of potential environmental risks. The question explored in the paper is whether or not these initiatives constitute a third way with respect to environmental policy. The answer depends upon whether it is directed to ideology or regulatory instruments. With respect to political ideology, President Clinton?s approach to the third way attempts to pursue a strategy that brackets ideological disputes in favor of ideas that work. He argues that a broad consensus exists as to the general direction environmental policy must take if it is to move forward, and that the existing political ideologies present us with a series of false choices, including the clash between environmental quality and economic growth. As part of the administration?s larger third way approach, the reinventing environmental regulation initiatives strive to be non-ideological. This contrasts sharply with the English approach to the third way, which is much more explicitly a conversation about ideology. The environmental movement does contain a genuine third way candidate, however. That candidate is variously called deep ecology, emancipatory ecology, or ecologism. It finds the major premises of existing political ideologies to be inadequate and offers us an alternative to them. So far, this third way has not played a visible role in the environmental policy debate. With respect to regulatory instruments, the administration?s reinventing program does constitute a genuine third way. Concentrating here on the regulatory instruments of market-based incentives and information disclosure, we can see that EPA is pursuing tactics that blend collectivism and individualism. Market-based incentives, for example, acknowledge the efficacy of the market and permit freedom of choice by market actors in ways that collectivism, as traditionally expressed in command-and-control regulation, does not. At the same time, the government establishes the objectives of the markets for environmental bads that EPA is exploring, most typically through cap-and-trade programs such as the Acid Rain program under the Clean Air Act. Thus the ultimate objective of the program remains subject to collective judgment to a greater degree than individualism prefers. The conclusion of the paper explores whether environmental policy can continue to remain agnostic as to ideology, or if conflict over the proper objectives of environmental policy will make ideological disagreements unavoidable.
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Feb 24, 2014
Paul T Decker 
Open Access