Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy

This book reviews and assesses environmental policy over the past three decades—primarily in the United States but with implications for other nations. The editors place U.S. environmental policy within the framework of the transition from 1970s-era policies that emphasized federally controlled regulation, through a period of criticism and efficiency-based reform efforts, to an emerging era of sustainability in which decisionmaking takes place increasingly at the local and regional levels. The book looks at what does and does not work and how social, economic, and environmental goals can be integrated through policy strategies grounded in the concept of sustainability.

Toward Sustainable Communities uses six case studies to illustrate innovative strategies in specific policy areas: air pollution control, water pollution control, land use, transportation, urban redevelopment, and regional ecosystem management. The contributors assess such new approaches as the use of market incentives and collaborative decisionmaking and place these experiments in the larger framework of the still-evolving transition to community sustainability.