Authoritative and trusted, Environmental Policy once again brings together top scholars to evaluate the changes and continuities in American environmental policy since the late 1960s and their implications for the twenty-first century. Students will learn to decipher the underlying trends, institutional constraints, and policy dilemmas that shape today’s environmental politics.
The Tenth Edition examines how policy has changed within federal institutions and state and local governments, as well as how environmental governance affects private sector policies and practices. The book provides in-depth examinations of public policy dilemmas including fracking, food production, urban sustainability, and the viability of using market solutions to address policy challenges. Students will also develop a deeper understanding of global issues such as climate change governance, the implications of the Paris Agreement, and the role of environmental policy in the developing world. Students walk away with a measured yet hopeful evaluation of the future challenges policymakers will confront as the American environmental movement continues to affect the political process.
Norman J. Vig is the Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor of Science, Technology,
and Society emeritus at Carleton College. He has written extensively on environmental
policy, science and technology policy, and comparative politics and is coeditor
with Michael G. Faure of Green Giants? Environmental Policies of the United States
and the European Union (MIT Press, 2004) and with Regina S. Axelrod and David
Leonard Downie of The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy, 2nd ed.
(CQ Press, 2005).
Michael E. Kraft is professor emeritus of political science
and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Green
Bay. He is the author of, among other works, Environmental
Policy and Politics, 8th ed. (2022), and coauthor of
Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental
Performance (2011), with Mark Stephan and Troy D. Abel.
In addition, he is the coeditor of Environmental Policy:
New Directions in the 21st Century, 12th ed. (2025), with
Barry G. Rabe and Norman J. Vig; Toward Sustainable
Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy, 2nd ed. (2009), with
Daniel A. Mazmanian; and Business and Environmental Policy: Corporate Interests in the
American Political System (2007) and The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy (2013),
with Sheldon Kamieniecki. For over forty years, he taught courses in environmental policy and
politics, American government, Congress, and public policy analysis.
