Structuring Bureaucratic Performance? Assessing the Policy Impact of Environmental Agency Design

Abstract

Recent research suggests that the structural design of American state environmental agencies impacts their performance, with agencies that combine environmental protection with other functions like public health or natural resource management regulating pollution emissions less stringently than those that focus exclusively on environmental protection. Using a set of panel data models, this study assesses this claim across several major U.S. environmental programs, including those regulating air pollution, water pollution, and hazardous waste. The results are mixed. Though support for the agency structure hypothesis is found in some models, taken together, the findings tend to refute the notion that an environmental agency’s structure has systematic, predictable impacts on its regulatory performance across programs and regulatory activities. Rather, they suggest that the effects of agency design may be more nuanced and context-dependent than articulations of this theory commonly suggest.