Environmental Policy Analysis at an Inflection Point

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

The basic structure of U.S. environmental policy was built in the 1970s around a command-and-control model designed to address discrete, bounded pollution problems, implemented through a federalist system that assigned significant authority to the federal government. Fifty years later, that system faces cross-boundary, complex environmental challenges it was not designed to address.

That policy infrastructure is now being systematically dismantled. Workforce reductions at federal environmental agencies, rollbacks of environmental protections, and the elimination of federal data collection programs are eroding the administrative and analytical infrastructure for U.S. environmental policy. These changes occur in a system already characterized by enormous variation across states in policy ambition, institutional capacity, and political will — producing genuine innovation in some places and genuine governance failures in others. At the same time, artificial intelligence is reshaping what is technically possible in environmental policy analysis, while the explosive growth of data centers is generating new environmental pressures that existing regulatory frameworks are poorly equipped to address.

This roundtable asks how environmental policy analysis should respond. Substantively, how does a federal system designed for a different era respond to emerging challeges? Which actors and institutions are filling gaps left by federal retrenchment, and with what consequences for environmental outcomes and justice? How do we build the data infrastructure needed to study subnational innovation when federal data collection is contracting? Methodologically, a field organized around evaluating individual policy effectiveness may not be well-positioned to study the governance landscape that is actually emerging. Environmental outcomes rarely result from a single policy acting in isolation. They emerge from governance systems — overlapping policies at multiple levels of government, interacting with non-governmental actors, shaped by variation in political attention and funding, and ideally incorporating learning over time about what worked, why, and for whom. Treating the problem rather than the policy as the unit of analysis opens up more generative questions better suited to the dynamic, multi-scalar, and increasingly data-scarce environment analysts now face.

Panelists bring complementary expertise across a range of environmental issues and methods. Daniel Fiorino (American University), a former senior EPA official, brings practitioner perspective on federal regulatory capacity and its erosion, with research spanning air quality, regulatory design, and environmental federalism. Sara Hughes (University of Michigan) studies local environmental governance and municipal capacity across climate, water, and sustainability policy, with particular attention to what subnational governments can and cannot do on their own. Chris Koski (Reed College) examines subnational policy variation, policy design, and agenda-setting across environmental and climate policy, with expertise in how political and institutional conditions shape what states actually do. Tyler Scott (UC Davis) uses computational methods — including network analysis and automated text analysis — to study governance coordination, science use in environmental decision-making, and infrastructure policy, and brings direct expertise in the methodological challenges and opportunities that AI tools present for the field. Moderator Elizabeth Baldwin (University of Arizona) brings expertise that spans energy, water, and invasive species policy at the intersection of law, public policy, and policy implementation.

Policy Area

• Natural Resource, Energy, and Environmental Policy

Moderator

• Elizabeth Baldwin, University of Arizona

Organizer

• Elizabeth Baldwin, University of Arizona

Speakers

• Daniel J Fiorino, American University

• Sara Hughes, RAND Corporation

• Chris Koski, Reed College

• Tyler A Scott, University of California, Davis