Emerging Issues in Decentralized Resource Governance: Environmental Federalism, Spillovers, and Linked Socio-Ecological Systems

Abstract

Spillovers among jurisdictions are ubiquitous and likely to increase with increasing population and consumption, so the centralization or decentralization of environmental governance is of pressing concern in a world of tightly linked socio-ecological systems. Spillovers play a key role in federalism analysis because they tend to reduce benefits from decentralization. Laboratory federalism, a common rationale for decentralization, has not proven successful as a model of local policy innovation. Given a national policy toward a public good, differences in preferences across jurisdictions may push national policy toward a quantity instrument rather than a tax instrument. Finally, the lack of interaction between environmental federalism analysis and studies of adaptive governance and linked complex adaptive systems leaves both literatures incomplete. The increasing urgency of global sustainability issues argues for linking insights from environmental federalism with the literature on linked socio-ecological complex adaptive systems. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 12 is October 5, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Investigating the role of spatial spillovers as determinants of land conversion in urbanizing Canada

“…When there are spatial spillovers, the benefits of decentralized resource management tend to diminish. This is because local governments strive to achieve local optima without fully considering the costs beyond their jurisdiction (Shobe, 2020). Without the high-level government intervention, localized collaborations may not lead to the socially-optimal land conservation (other activities alike), and externalities are likely to exist.…”

“…Meanwhile, the central government at the federal level is probably more interested in knowing the total spillovers across the entire country or region due to local action in a specific area. Recent studies (e.g., see Shobe, 2020) discussed some emerging issues in resource governance when there are spillovers among vertical and horizontal jurisdictions.…”

Local Environmental Policy in a Federal System: An Overview

“…Local Environmental Policy in a Federal System 197 and subnational units of government in controlling environmental problems." Useful surveys of this literature include Oates (2002); Dijkstra and Fredriksson (2010); and Shobe (2020). This paper provides an overview of some of the issues that can/do arise when policy is made at the local level and thereby provides a broad context in which the papers from the NAREA workshop published in this volume can be placed.…”

“…The presence of interjurisdictional spillovers or externalities is often cited as a strong rationale for policy making at higher levels (Oates 2002;Banzhaf and Chupp 2012;Shobe 2020). The validity of this argument depends on the specific nature of the policy decisions.…”

“…Moreover, decision making at various levels is often interdependent, as when one level of government enacts policies specifically designed to enhance or undermine policies set at another level (Shobe and Burtraw 2012;Williams 2012;Chang, Sigman, and Traub 2014;Shobe 2020). For example, a state might seek to impose regulations (such as auto emissions standards) that are more stringent than those set at the federal level when it feels federal regulations are not sufficient for that state.…”