Environmental Policy and Property-based Interests: The Domestic and International Politics of Air Pollution in Canada and the United States

This thesis provides an account of continuity and change in air pollution governance in Canada and the United States. In doing so, it explicates the role of property-based interests in this process. Property-based interests are spatially bound actors who seek to benefit economically from the use and sale of land. In pursuance of this objective, they tend to promote economic growth, although often this takes the form of managed growth within limits. They include, but are not limited to, homeowners' associations, local and regional chambers of commerce, issue-specific regional environmental organizations, and urban newspapers. As air pollution undermines the ability of these actors (or their members) to generate wealth from property holdings, they have historically provided much of the political will to address it by lobbying governments, engaging in litigation, promoting their cause to the broader public, conducting or framing research, and developing policy solutions. At the same time, the industrial interests causing much of the pollution (including resource processing, electricity generating, and manufacturing firms) are less concerned about the local or regional economy, and more with the health of the broader market for their products, and in keeping down the costs of production. These industrial interests tend to lobby governments and engage in litigation with the objective of preventing the imposition of costly regulation. In providing an account of the role of property (and, to a lesser extent, industry) in shaping air pollution governance, this dissertation employs the concept, common in the international relations literature, of a governance "regime." Four regimes of air pollution governance are examined: (1) the American domestic regime, (2) the Canadian domestic regime, (3) the Canada-US bilateral regime, and (4) the multilateral air pollution regime in which both countries participate. The accounts of the development of these regimes focus on the role of property-based interests in pushing for air pollution relief and industrial interests in resisting. The dissertation shows that policy outcomes tend to be the result of compromises between these two categories of actors, and also provides a framework for understanding how it is that some efforts at governing air pollution result in substantive governance, while others do not.