IIA Valuation and Collaboration: The Uses of Economic Research in Negotiated and Participatory Decision Making

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The project will analyze the interplay between economic studies, such as cost-benefit analyses, and participatory, discursive, and deliberative processes, such as stakeholder negotiations, in environmental decision making. A great deal of research during the past two decades has sought to improve the techniques of economic valuation and value solicitation; a smaller though significant body of research addresses participatory approaches to environmental problem solving. This project will identify and classify ways in which economic analyses of different kinds have proven useful in negotiated environmental rulemaking and in other deliberative and collaborative efforts to solve environmental problems. On the basis of historical, conceptual, and normative research, this project will recommend approaches to economic valuation intended to increase its relevance for participatory and deliberative efforts to resolve environmental disputes. The project employs, first, a conceptually informed historical and inductive method to develop and review case studies of environmental negotiations in which cost-benefit and other economic analyses play an important role. The proposal describes two examples: 1) negotiations under way to establish a system of tradable grazing rights to forage on public lands; and 2) the negotiated regulation requiring strict emission controls at the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona. The project employs, second, the methods of normative and conceptual analysis to examine within the context of democratic political theory the relation between current efforts to "reinvent regulation" through more participatory, decentralized decision-making structures and efforts to "reform regulation" through the use of more and better scientific, technical, and economic analysis. The research proposed here seeks to show how regulatory decisions could draw legitimacy from both approaches if they were better aligned with each other. This project thus intends to respond in part to the perennial problem of the legitimacy of environmental regulation (as distinct from common-law protections) in view of the delegation (or overdelegation) of legislative authority to administrative agencies since the New Deal.