Environmental Risk, Environmental Values, And Political Choices: Beyond Efficiency Tradeoffs In Public Policy Analysis

Public decisions on environmental risk have traditionally been weighed in terms of the principle of efficiency and its methodologies, such as cost-benefit and risk-benefit analysis. These original essays argue for moving beyond the market paradigm toward making policy that incorporates environmental values. Scholars representing a broad range of disciplines present a thorough analysis and methodological investigation of environmental risk and the potential for integrating environmental values into the policymaking process. They address the normative and theoretical roots of environmental risk, describe the distinct domain that exists for environmental values as opposed to economic values, and look at the conflicts between economic and environmental values within the applied context of the NIMBY (not in my back yard) phenomenon.

John Martin Gillroy is assistant professor and Dana Faculty Fellow in the Department of Political Science and director of the Public Policy Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.