| Policies governing natural resources reach back to the earliest days of the United States, but the distinctive shape of the environmental policy domain emerged in the 1970s with passage of seminal pieces of legislation. During the 1990s, calls for a "next generation" of policy spawned a decade of experimentation with alternatives to so-called "command and control" approaches, most notably relying on market-based or negotiation-based performance incentives. No consensus has emerged that these experiments constitute a satisfactory next generation paradigm, and calls for new policy approaches continue.; The notion that environmental policy is at a crossroads is widely held, and I argue that it reflects a focus on increasing efficiency and performance without an overarching vision of intended outcomes or, in other words, a failure to fully articulate what environmental policies should be about. In light of new issues vying for attention, evolving relationships among science, society, and policy-making, and the emergence of globalization, I propose the need for a normative decision, undertaken collectively within society, about whether to limit the domain to first-generation goals of pollution control and prevention or expand it to include new issues that are conceptually more abstract, geographically more diffuse, and more likely to be inconveniently enmeshed with lifestyle. The sense of being at a crossroads reflects the reality that choosing between these diverging visions constitutes more than a choice between political strategies.; The historical and philosophical premises of the policy domain make expansion likely, but not easy. I offer case studies of efforts by a federal agency to enhance its policy-relevance, of fragmented discourses on water scarcity, and of the dilemma posed by Great Lakes diversions to illustrate that an expanded policy domain would require new mechanisms to ensure verifiably science-based, yet socially meaningful civic-centered decision-making. Global dimensions of public decision-making require the legitimization of coordinated multi-scalar (i.e., local, national, and global) governance regimes that still reserve authentic democratic control over national and local decisions. A reformed, more robust national policy domain is needed that can identify public environmental goods to be enjoyed by all citizens and play a harmonizing role in a multi-scalar context. |
