Federalism and Environmental Regulation: A Public Choice Analysis

Environmental decentralization and political centralization

“…Esty (1996-97) suggests that decentralized environmental policymaking gives better-financed industry groups an advantage over environmental groups as they are able to cover the high fixed costs involved with having an office in each lower level jurisdiction. On the other hand, Revesz (2001) argues that at the national level a minimum spending level must be achieved which implies that centralization favors industry; grassroots environmental groups have a comparative advantage at the local level. Complete decentralization would help avoid a possible bias due to the majority party in Congress or parliament favoring its own home districts with weaker regulations .…”

Conceptualizing the above ground factors in shale gas: Toward a research agenda on regulatory governance

“…An impressive body of literature has investigated the traction of this 'bottom up' argument for climate change governance in North America [2,120,132] or environmental regulation [1,98,125]. 4 The main finding is that state-level measures have become instrumental in addressing key environmental concerns in the absence of more aggregate-level policies and have proven innovative additions to the regulatory toolbox.…”

Designing Economic Instruments for the Environment in a Decentralized Fiscal System

“…The debate on an environmental race to the bottom first arose in the USA in the early 1970s, as the federal government began to displace the several states in environmental enforcement (Stein, 1971; Peltzman and Tideman, 1973). It continues to this day; for overviews and detailed discussions, see Revesz (1992, 1996), Wellisch (1995), Esty (1996), Oates and Schwab (1996), Anderson and Hill (1997), Engel (1997), Farber (1997), Oates (2002), Levinson (2003), Oates and Portney (2003), Kunce and Shogren (2005) and Dalmazzone (2006). It might appear that the possible existence of a race to the bottom in environmental quality is a factor generally in favor of a more centralized assignment of emissions control.…”