The subject matter of this book is not exactly what its title suggests. The author's attention is limited to industrial pollution regulatory policy in the United States, rather than focusing on environmental regulation more broadly. And the “new” regulation it touts is not really all that new. Daniel Fiorino does not describe and analyze something that has been invented recently, say, in the last five to 10 years, nor does he propose something wholly original or novel that has never before been tried or imagined. Many of the regulatory tools that he lumps together under the label of “new” can be traced back decades, some to even before the modern federal pollution regulatory era began in 1970, and so many of them are as old as or older than much of his “old” pollution regulation. Fiorino uses the adjective “new” because it is an inherently appealing, future-oriented label whether one is selling soap, politicians, or ideas. Although “old” hints at something worn out, no longer desirable, and perhaps near death, he does not want to bury the old regulation: “Designing and implementing a new regulation does not mean that we should do away with the old one” (p. 190). By using “old” as his label of convenience, he at least sidesteps an ideological minefield by avoiding the also-loaded label “command and control,” which is often used by political critics of adversarial, directive regulation in the public interest.
What Fiorino summarizes and contrasts in this book are two strategies for regulating industrial pollution. The first is a strategy (old regulation) of establishing and enforcing a complex set of directives aimed at specific inputs or outputs of production processes. The second is a strategy (new regulation) that, while retaining several elements of the old regulation—namely, demanding normative standards, legal authority and enforcement capability, information availability, and independent advocacy—differentiates among regulated firms on the basis of past and expected future performance, incorporates mechanisms and incentives that promote continuous performance improvements, builds policy learning capacity, measures performance at all levels, and creates mechanisms and relationships that build trust.
Because this new regulation is not all that new, there are hundreds of policy reforms and initiatives in the United States and abroad, many of them well studied, that provide an empirical foundation for understanding the potential, limitations, and design prerequisites for a pollution regulation system that would be more flexible, less adversarial, less directive, and more performance based. The value of The New Environmental Regulation is that it brings together a wide range of this research (particularly the U.S. based portion of it) and, because of the author's extensive personal experience with several flexible regulatory initiatives at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, distills key lessons for the design of the U.S. industrial pollution regulatory system of the future. Such systemic regulatory reform is badly needed, Fiorino argues, not only for cost and efficiency reasons but for environmental reasons as well. Instead of a regulatory system with a reach limited to the inputs and outputs of production processes, a more flexible performance-based system can achieve dramatic improvements in environmental outcomes by influencing other activities in a product value chain, such as research and development, raw materials sourcing, customer service, marketing, and end-of-life disposal.
The book proceeds straightforwardly, beginning with a history of the old regulation and an evaluation and critique of it. Middle chapters analyze various influences that promote the greening of portions of the business community and the many, mostly nonstatutory, initiatives of the federal and state governments that experiment piecemeal with flexible performance-based approaches. Fiorino also considers some conceptual issues relevant to the politics of regulation, putting his arguments for a new regulation in the context of developments in reflexive law, civil governance, policy learning, and civic environmentalism. The final chapter presents his design principles for a new regulation, discusses the kinds of changes in laws and agencies that a transition will require, and identifies the near-term steps that need to be taken to facilitate longer-term fundamental change when the political conditions for that become more propitious.
Aside from an eight-page analysis of Dutch regulation, The New Environmental Regulation does not look much to other countries for comparative insights into regulatory policies generally or industrial pollution regulatory systems in particular. Fiorino acknowledges, for example, that the design and evolution of environmental regulation in the United States has been influenced by both a constitutional system that fragments power and a cultural belief in a limited state, but he does not explore the significance of federalism and a constitutionally limited state as compared with other countries, notably constitutionally limited federal ones.
Thus, the book's strengths are also its main weaknesses. It is a book of limited scope, and so it may be of limited interest for many political scientists. It has no pretensions of theoretical profundity. As mentioned earlier, it makes no effort to compare industrial pollution regulation with other areas of environmental regulation, nor does it draw much from, or speak to, the political science literature on regulation generally. But it is a significant, integrative work that addresses a crucially important matter of practical policy reform, and so it is worthy of attention. The analysis it offers is thoughtful, cogent, and insightful. Fiorino's writing is accessible, and he discusses many real-world examples, making the book an excellent resource for politicians, practitioners, scholars, and students interested in improving industrial pollution control regulatory policy specifically.
