Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-First Century

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Authoritative and classic, the seventh edition of Environmental Policy once again brings together top scholars to evaluate the impact of past environmental policy while anticipating its future implications, helping students decipher the underlying trends, institutional constraints, and policy dilemmas that shape environmental politics.

This new edition represents the most extensive revision to date: five new chapters include coverage of national security and the environment, China’s environmental problems, domestic and international actions on climate change, conflicts over U.S. natural resource policies and collaborative ecosystem management, and the role of economics and market incentives in environmental policy. Incorporating analysis of the eight years under George W. Bush and a look ahead to the Barack Obama administration, all chapters include new scholarship, case studies, poll data, court rulings, congressional actions, agency decisions, and other events at the international, national, state, and local levels. With its clear, engaging writing, this tried and true reader makes great environmental research and scholarship accessible to an undergraduate audience.

Environmental Policy includes new coverage of:

• national energy policy
• climate change 
• implementation of the Endangered Species Act 
• exploration for oil and natural gas on public lands 
• ecosystem management 
• the role of science in environmental policy 
• court decisions that challenge administrative rulemaking 
• the greening of industry
• urban sustainability initiatives 
• the environmental effects of national security decisions 
• economic development and the environment

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.