619 research outputs found
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Imagining Corporate Sustainability as a Public Good Rather than a Corporate Bad
Corporations have been criticized for their environmental misdeeds for over a century, so it is not surprising that many view corporate approaches to sustainability with skepticism. Reports of green-washing and other forms of misleading advertising by a handful of corporations only serve to reinforce this negative perception.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
Deregulation Using Stealth “Science” Strategies
In this Article, we explore the “stealth” use of science by the Executive Branch to advance deregulation and highlight the limited, existing legal and institutional constraints in place to discipline and discourage these practices. Political appointees have employed dozens of strategies over the years, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, to manipulate science in ends-oriented ways that advance the goal of deregulation. Despite this bald manipulation of science, however, the officials frequently present these strategies as necessary to bring “sound science” to bear on regulatory decisions. To begin to address this problem, it is important to reconceptualize how the administrative state addresses science-intensive decisions. Rather than allow agencies and the White House to operate as a cohesive unit, institutional bounds should be drawn around the scientific expertise lodged within the agencies. We propose that the background scientific work prepared by agency staff should be firewalled from the evaluative, policymaking input of the remaining officials, including politically appointed officials, in the agency
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Misunderstanding Models in Environmental and Public Health Regulation
Computational models are fundamental to environmental regulation, yet their capabilities tend to be misunderstood by policymakers. Rather than rely on models to illuminate dynamic and uncertain relationships in natural settings, policymakers too often use models as “answer machines.” This fundamental misperception that models can generate decisive facts leads to a perverse negative feedback loop that begins with policymaking itself and radiates into the science of modeling and into regulatory deliberations where participants can exploit the misunderstanding in strategic ways. This paper documents the pervasive misperception of models as truth machines in U.S. regulation and the multi-layered problems that result from this misunderstanding. The paper concludes with a series of proposals for making better use of models in environmental policy analysis.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
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Rulemaking in the Shade: An Empirical Study of EPA’s Air Toxic Emissions
In this article, the authors trace the engagement and the influence of interest groups over the entire life cycle of a complete set of complex EPA rules that set emissions standards for the industrial release of air toxins. In particular they focus on three of the most worrisome phases of the administrative process where imbalances in interest group engagement and influence may be occurring. The thesis of this study is that imbalances in interest group engagement are occurring at critical albeit somewhat obscure stages of the rulemaking life cycle and that these imbalances are impacting the substance of the rulemaking project.
This article proceeds in five parts. Part I explores three stages in the rulemaking life cycle that may be afflicted with imbalanced interest group engagement that in turn might distort the outcome of the rulemaking project. Part II describes the methods of the article, which examine the nature of interest group engagement and activity at these problem stages in a complete set of rules promulgated by the EPA governing the industrial emissions of air toxics. Part III describes the findings and Part IV collects information from disparate sources in detective like fashion to explain some of the surprises and new questions that emerge from this research. In the conclusion, the authors retell the store that emerges from their data and consider whether it suggests more pervasive problems in administrative law that will benefit from further study.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
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Making Method Visible: Improving the Quality of Science-Based Regulation
Scientific inferences are theories about how the world works that scientists formulate based on their observations. One of the most difficult issues at the intersection of law and science is to determine whether the weight of evidence supports one scientific inference versus other competing interpretations of the observations. In administrative law, this difficulty is exacerbated by the behavior of both the courts and regulatory agencies. Agencies seldom achieve quite the requisite visibility that explains the analytical methods they use to reach their scientific inferences. Courts – because they appreciate neither the variety of inferential methods nor their epistemic foundations – do not demand this level of visibility from the agencies.
We argue that much progress can be made toward visible, coherent, science-based regulation if courts ask two deceptively simple questions: (1) have the agency’s inferential methods been identified? and (2) does the agency explain how its methods are appropriate to the information on hand and how the methods support the agency’s inferences?The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
Examining Developmental Stages of Leadership for College Students: A Validation Study of the Leadership Identity Development Model
The purpose of this study was to confirm or disconfirm the leadership identity development (LID) model (Komives, Longerbeam, Owen, Mainella, & Osteen, 2006). The LID model identified six stages in the development of a leadership identity. Although used widely to inform the design of leadership development programs, it has not been validated by further research. This study used Q methodology to classify subjects with similar views of leadership into groups. The resulting groups were congruent with the stages of the LID model that are most frequently experienced during the college years.
Thirty-nine subjects described their points of view about leadership and themselves as leaders through a 64-item card sort, placing the cards into piles along a continuum from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Principle components analysis was used to classify subjects into groups based on similarities in the card sorts. The way each of the four resulting groups described leadership was interpreted by examination of an aggregate card sort representing the views of the students in that group. These descriptions were compared to the stages of the LID model.
Factor one from this study was similar to stages four through six of the LID model. There was no evidence distinguishing these three stages from each other in this subject sample. Factor two was similar to stage three with an independent view of self with others. Factor three was similar to stage three with a dependent view of self with others. Factor four had only a single subject, whose description did not readily fit into the LID model.
Further research is needed to examine the LID stages experienced pre-college, as well as further exploration into whether LID stages four through six are truly distinct. However, the findings of this study do provide support for the existence of the stages of development most often experienced during the college years (stages three and four) as described in the LID model
Using Competition-Based Regulation to Bridge the Toxics Data Gap
Symposium: Missing Information: The Scientific Data Gap in Conservation and Chemical Regulation, held on March 24, 2006 at Indiana University School of Law- Bloomington
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