Comparative Environmental Management in the American States.

This research extends and updates previous state environmental management research in the American states. As much comparative state environmental management research in the 1990s examined determinants of variation in environmental problems, these efforts have waned in recent years. This is largely due to 1) data collection challenges and changes over time; 2) multiple approaches for determining (defining) state management efficacy; and, 3) little consensus on what best constitutes environmental management/protection success or failure. Though it is well beyond the scope of any one paper to attempt to address all of these issue areas, we hope to begin through an examination of critical factors associated with our understanding of comparative state environmental management based on the introduction of a new variable that captures states' regulatory capacity to do so. The maturation of research by environmental scholars in the subfield has, over time, led to a more specialized focus on environmental media and, as a result, attention has moved away from the overall characterization of state environmental efforts. Though other important questions are examined by scholars in closely related areas, comparative state environmental effort is ripe for renewed exploration. Our goal is to revisit state environmental efforts across a host of economic, environmental, political, and social indicators. In developing this research, we construct factors demonstrated in the literature as robust representations for depicting a state's environmental management efforts through regulation. Our goal in this research, which is somewhat preliminary in that we are exploring relevant factors generally, is to isolate those indicators that explicitly and accurately depict a state's environmental standing vis-à-vis other states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]