Reports & Papers
BCSIA: 1996-1997 ANNUAL REPORT
5. Environment and Natural Resources Program
Members
Core Faculty and Staff
William Clark, Faculty Chair, ENRP; Project Director, GEA
Henry Lee, Director, ENRP
Abram Chayes, Law School, Harvard University
Cary Coglianese, Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Nancy Dickson, Associate Project Director, GEA
William Hogan, Thornton Bradshaw Professor of International Political Economy
John Holdren, Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy; Program Director and Faculty Chair,, Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program
Joseph Kalt, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy
Jo-Ann Mahoney, Coordinator, Events and Publications, ENRP
Theodore Panayotou, Fellow, Harvard Institute for International Development
Edward Parson, Associate Professor of Public Policy
Philip Sharp, Director, Institute of Politics
Robert Stavins, Professor of Public Policy
Rebecca Storo, Assistant to the GEA Project
Liz Tempesta, Assistant to the Director, ENRP
STEERING COMMITTEE
Carter Bales, Director and Senior Partner, McKinsey and Company
Stanley Charren, former Chairman, Kennetech, Inc.
Mitchell Dong, President, Chronos Asset Management
Mary Gade, Director, Illinois Environmental Protection Agency
William Haney, President and CEO, Molten Metal Technologies
Teresa Heinz, Chairwoman, Heinz Family Endowments
Harold Hestnes, Senior Partner, Hale and Dorr
Frederic Krupp, Executive Director, Environmental Defense Fund
William Reilly, former Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Ellen Roy, Vice President, Intercontinental Energy Company
John Sawhill, President, The Nature Conservancy
Donald Smith, President, Smith Cogeneration
Mason Willrich, Chairman, EnergyWorks
Timothy Wirth, Undersecretary for Global Affairs, U.S. Department of State
RESEARCH ASSOCIATES AND FELLOWS
ENRP Research Associates
Charles H. W. Foster, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government
Robert Frosch, Director, Industrial Ecology Project
Ronald Mitchell, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon
Shashi Verma, Kennedy School of Government
GEA Research Associates
Shardul Agrawala, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
David Cash, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
William Easterling, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University
Karen Fisher-Vanden, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Wendy Franz, Government Department, Harvard University
Alastair Iles, Law School, Harvard University
Jill Jäger, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Sheila Jasanoff, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University
Milind Kandlikar, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
Robert Keohane, Department of Political Science, Duke University
Marybeth Long, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the Department of Urban Studies and Panning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
James McCarthy, Departments of Biology and Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Michael McElroy, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Clark Miller, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University
Anthony Patt, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
James Risbey, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
Ambuj Sagar, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Willemijn Tuinistra, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
* Based at International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Vienna, Austria
Background
The Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP), formerly the Energy and Environmental Policy Center, has conducted research at the Kennedy School of Government and influenced U.S. and international environmental policy decisions for nearly 20 years. ENRP joined the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 1991.
ENRP provides a hub where faculty, students, and visiting scholars engage in interdisciplinary research on environmental policy issues. The Program supports work on critical issues including: market-based approaches to reducing pollution; global environmental change; sustainable development; and natural resource management in the United States and abroad. ENRP''s research teams assess the impacts of environmental and natural resource policy, analyze policy options, and design new programmatic initiatives to confront emerging concerns at the global, international, and domestic levels.
ENRP''s mandate is twofold: to conduct cutting-edge research and to ensure that its results contribute to the public policy debate. The Program rests on three pillars: (1) teaching and training, (2) outreach, and (3) research. Faculty connected with ENRP teach a range of courses on topics including sustainable development, natural resource economics, environmental management and politics, international environmental law, and negotiations and natural resource policy. Case material drawn from ongoing empirical and theoretical research is used to enhance the curriculum of both graduate and executive training programs.
ENRP convenes workshops and executive sessions that bring together senior officials from government, industry, and key interest groups to discuss major policy issues in a neutral setting. Papers produced by ENRP researchers are distributed widely to authorities in the federal government, including congressional committee chairs and leaders from business, academia, and nongovernmental organizations.
In 1997 ENRP sponsored a forum address by Carol Browner, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) to launch the Clinton administration''s commitment to "Protecting Public Health: EPA''s New Proposed Clean Air Standards." Other highlights included Timothy Wirth, Undersecretary of Global Affairs at the U.S. State Department, who discussed the administration''s environmental initiatives in the global arena, and Sir Crispin Tickell, former adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Britain''s ambassador to the United Nations, who addressed several major international environmental problems and their future implications.
ENRP''s work in 1996-97 was sponsored by the following organizations: the U.S. EPA; the U.S. Department of Energy; the National Science Foundation; the National Park Foundation; the National Institute for Global Environmental Change; the Shell Corporation; AMOCO; Agencia de Desenvolvimento Tiete Parana; and Unidad Electrica S.A., the electric utility company of Spain. Work in previous years has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and by IBM and Mobil corporations.
Research agenda and policy outreach
Research in 1996-97 has focused on the following main issue areas:
I. Market Systems for Environmental Goals, which examines market-based instruments for implementing cost-effective means to meet environmental standards.
II. Global Environmental Assessment Project, an international effort with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), based in Vienna, Austria, which analyzes the relationship between the process of assessing global environmental problems and related decision making in the public and private sectors.
III. Climate Change Policy, a multifaceted effort sponsored by the U.S. EPA to analyze means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, both nationally and globally, through joint implementation and the use of market incentives.
IV. Managing Public Infrastructure, an international executive training effort that ENRP has initiated to teach Latin American government officials and business leaders how to effectively privatize and manage infrastructure. The program sponsored the development of 12 new cases studies in 1996-97, and will produce another 4 case studies in 1997-98.
V. National Park Service Project, which assesses ways in which the National Park Service (NPS) can deal with its growing capital needs.
In addition, ENRP researchers have been integrally involved in two STPP endeavors: the Managing the Atom Project and the Energy R&D for a Greenhouse-Gas Constrained World Project. The addition of John Holdren as the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy has contributed greatly to the development of a close relationship between ENRP and STPP.
A description of specific initiatives for 1996-97 within each research area follows.
I. Market Systems for Environmental Goals
Robert Stavins became a full professor at the Kennedy School in the spring of 1997, brings to ENRP an exceptionally strong capability in the field of environmental economics. Stavins''s work centers on devising and analyzing market-based instruments to tackle environmental goals. In 1988, at the request of U.S. Senators Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.) and John Heinz (R-Penn.), Stavins assembled and directed a team of 50 members from academia, government, private industry, and the environmental community in a bipartisan effort, "Project 88," which produced the report "Harnessing Market Forces to Protect Our Environment: Initiatives for the New President." The tradable permit system for acid-rain reduction, recommended by Project 88, was included in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.
Over the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to market-based instruments— principally pollution taxes and fees and tradable permits— as a supplement to or substitute for conventional command-and-control instruments. Market-based instruments can be cost effective, minimizing the aggregate cost of achieving an environmental target, and can provide dynamic incentives for the adoption and diffusion of cheaper and better technologies.
The political process has gradually become more receptive to market-based instruments. Tradable permit systems were used in the 1980s to accomplish the phasedown of lead in gasoline and to facilitate the phaseout of ozone-depleting chloroflourocarbons. In the 1990s, tradable permit systems were used to implement stricter air pollution controls in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, and— most important— to control acid rain under the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.
Research, training, and outreach at the Kennedy School have long emphasized the role of market-based instruments. First, we continued to expand our research in this area. Second, courses were offered that focused exclusively on the economic dimensions of environmental policy; these included a course on Environmental and Resource Economics and Policy, another on Natural Resource Economics in Developing Countries, and a seminar in Environmental Economics and Policy. Third, in terms of outreach, the Kennedy School has been a major participant in national and international deliberations on the design and implementation of market-based strategies for environmental protection, including climate change, land protection, and air and water pollution.
II. Global Environmental Assessment Project
The Global Environmental Assessment (GEA) Project is an interinstitutional endeavor based at Harvard and the IIASA in Vienna. Research fellows comprise the core of the Project. Ten fellows spent the year working with one another and with the 15 project faculty as a research group exploring histories, processes, and effects of global environmental assessment. This year the GEA Project focused specifically on the past three decades of climate assessment experience as a dynamic learning process. Building on a year of scholarship by the GEA research group, the Harvard Committee on the Environment and the Center for the Application of Research on the Environment convened the first Workshop on Global Environmental Assessment and Public Policy. The workshop, entitled "A Critical Evaluation of Global Environmental Assessment: The Climate Experience," was held on June 22-28, 1997, in Bar Harbor, Maine. This was the first in a series of workshops designed to provide an opportunity for review of, and reflection on, the relationship between the process of assessing global environmental problems and related decision making in the public and private sectors. By establishing and sustaining a critical, continuing dialogue among assessment practitioners and managers, users of scientific assessments, and scholars of the assessment process, the GEA Project seeks to support the development of an increasingly informed and reflective community of individuals engaged in understanding and shaping the relationships between science and policy in global environmental affairs. For the research year beginning in September 1997, the research group will continue to explore the climate issue and add a comparative look at long-range transport and tropospheric air pollution.
The GEA Project is a collaborative team study of global environmental assessment as a link between science and policy. Based at Harvard University, the team consists of a core group of faculty and senior research staff with a wide range of experience in research on the natural and social science dimensions of global environmental change, and in the related fields of policy and decision analysis. Its members are drawn from IIASA, Cornell University, Duke University, and the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carnegie Mellon University. This five-year project receives support from the National Science Foundation''s Human Dimensions of Global Change Initiative, the US Department of Energy, the National Institute for Global Environmental Change, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Project has three goals: (1) deepening the critical understanding of the relationships among research, assessment, and management in the global environmental arena; (2) enhancing communication between scholars and practitioners of global environmental assessments; and (3) illuminating the choices that designers of global environmental assessments currently face.
The Project is explicitly global in scope and seeks to understand the special problems, challenges, and opportunities that arise in efforts to develop common scientific assessments that are relevant and credible across multiple national circumstances and political cultures. Global environmental change is viewed broadly. During the first year of the project, 1996-97, the focus was on global climate change. This will be extended next year to include research on long-range transport and tropospheric air pollution. A long-term perspective focuses on the interactions of science, assessment, and management over periods of a decade or more, rather than concentrating on specific studies or negotiating sessions has been adopted.
The Project has adopted a four-prong strategy in pursuit of its goals.
Fellows: Each year a group of pre- and postdoctoral fellows is recruited to the Project through an international competition, supplemented with selected students from Harvard''s own institutions. These individuals are drawn from the natural and social sciences. They receive training in relevant interdisciplinary research methods, and collaborate with faculty in research on global environmental assessment. As the Project develops, we seek to build an international network of alumnae especially knowledgeable about, and sensitive to, questions concerning the conduct and impact of global environmental assessments.
Training and Research Seminar: A year-long training and research seminar exposes faculty and fellows to a range of relevant research and professional perspectives. For most of the year, the seminar is based at Harvard. For the months of January and February, the seminar and the fellows move to the IIASA in Vienna. As IIASA is one of the world''s foremost centers for international environmental assessments, this shift of venue allows for inclusion of a much wider range of national experiences and disciplinary approaches in the Project.
Research Papers: Fellows and faculty collaborate in shaping and conducting empirical research studies on particular aspects of assessment throughout the year. These are circulated for review as discussion papers before being targeted at relevant conferences and journals.
Scholar and Practitioner Collaboration: The GEA Project is a university-based research venture seeking to understand assessments, not an applied policy effort attempting to perform or design assessments. However, a scholarly perspective alone can yield only a partial understanding of the constraints, opportunities, and trade-offs faced by assessment practitioners. Much of the Project''s potential therefore lies in its ability to integrate the detached, long-term, scholarly perspectives emerging from our own research with the up-close-and-personal "view from the trenches" of experienced assessment practitioners and users. To promote such an integration of scholar, practitioner, and user perspectives, we have initiated a collaboration with the Center for the Application of Research on the Environment (CARE) of the Institute of Global Environment and Society. Working with CARE, and a group of research and assessment managers from NOAA, DOE, NASA and NSF, the Project has planned a series of annual collaborative Workshops on Global Environmental Assessment and Public Policy.
Perspective on Assessment
The GEA Project embraces a broad view of the ways in which scientists'' efforts to understand the worlds of global environmental change interact with society''s responses to global environmental issues— both as problems to be resolved and as opportunities to exploit in addressing other issues. The focus of the analysis is beyond assessment reports or even the assessment process.
The research on the climate change issue that was performed during the first year of the Project covered more than 50 individual assessments in which scientists from the United States had played major roles over the last 25 years. The results of in-depth studies conducted by the GEA research fellows shaped and in turn reflected a perspective on assessment that emphasized the following:
Social process: Assessments are most productively viewed as a social process in which the publication of formal reports is only the most tangible aspect. Also important are how the process handles such issues as participation, evaluation, and the negotiation of boundaries between scientific and policy considerations.
Context matters: The assessment process needs to be viewed in context. The kinds of assessments produced and the effectiveness of particular assessment approaches depend on the maturity of scientific understanding, the stage of issue development and politics, and the institutional settings within which the assessment process is carried out.
Dynamic, iterative character of assessment: Assessment processes shape themselves in important ways. Single ad hoc assessments and assessments undertaken as part of a series of related reports differ significantly. These differences entail issues regarding the community''s capacity to perform assessments, the credibility of those assessments, and the ability of the assessments to question and recast the frame of the debate.
III. Climate Change Policy
ENRP faculty began working on climate change issues in the mid-1980s. William Clark was one of the principals at the Villach Conference in 1985 that warned the world''s leaders that greenhouse gas concentrations could present the planet with a problem of unprecedented dimension. From 1990 to 1994, over a dozen faculty worked on issues including negotiation strategies, mitigation operations, and economic costs. A portion of this work appeared in Shaping International Responses to Climate Change, edited by Henry Lee and published by Island Press in 1995. In recent years, researchers have focused on three principal areas: joint implementation, policy responses to climate change, and fossil fuel plant reduction.
Joint Implementation
This project explores factors that affect the design and implementation of effective Joint Implementation initiatives. In 1996-97 Assistant Professor Ted Parson and research fellow Karen Fisher-Vanden looked at Joint Implementation as a means to transfer needed financial assistance to developing countries and compared it to other financial transfer programs such as the Global Environmental Facility. Their report, "Joint Implementation and Its Alternatives: Choosing Systems to Distribute Global Emissions Abatement and Finance," was circulated throughout the policy community. A second project, under the direction of Parson and Visiting Fellow Ron Mitchell, will analyze how Joint Implementation initiatives might be monitored and enforced. For example, they will look at how investors from funding nations ensure that net reductions are made and maintained.
Finally, we will consider the means and processes to identify the most promising win-win opportunities for investment in carbon reduction. For example, China may seek benefit from substantial reductions in local air pollution problems by investing in new transportation opportunities, some of which could also have significant carbon reduction potential. Questions will include: What is the process or mechanism by which this carbon reduction potential is identified by both China and the United States? What would a transitional program, larger than the present pilot initiatives, but less ambitious than full-scale tradable permits, look like? And how could China and the United States work together to set up such a program?
Policy Responses to Climate Change
A second area or research is the design of U.S. and international policy responses. As the December 1997 Kyoto summit approaches, researchers at the Kennedy School have been assessing a variety of tradable permit options for carbon reductions. ENRP Faculty Chair Robert Stavins and Robert Hahn, BCSIA affiliate from the American Enterprise Institute, are writing a major assessment of international trading options for greenhouse gases, drawing from the experiences with conventional pollutants such as sodium dioxide and lead. Henry Lee is working on a paper on the design of a domestic tradable permit system.
Professor Dale Jorgenson, through his research over the past decade, has become one of the world''s premier experts on the impact of changes in energy prices on economic growth and technology development. Jorgenson has been actively advising the Clinton administration''s efforts to model the economic impacts of various climate change responses.
Much of the work undertaken by John Holdren in the area of energy research and development relates to expanding the menu of opportunities for energy producers to reduce greenhouse gases. Any energy R&D program in the twenty-first century will be driven in part by a concern for reducing the use of fossil fuels. Holdren''s research will develop strategies and options to meet these goals.
Fossil Fuel Plant Reduction
This project continues Henry Lee''s research on the effects of electricity restructuring on the environment. Specifically, it explores the economics of coal generating plants in the Midwest— that is, in Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Michigan— and how restructuring and new U.S. EPA''s air pollution requirements might affect the competitiveness of these plants.
IV. Managing Public Infrastructure
ENRP, in concert with the Kennedy School''s Executive Programs, has established a new executive training program to address infrastructure privatization and management. This program was developed in response to a demand for training on how to effectively privatize, manage, and finance public infrastructure in the areas of energy, transport, sewage, and water in developing countries.
Kennedy School faculty, led by Henry Lee, conducted three training sessions on infrastructure privatization in Brazil. The first session in January 1997 focused on transportation. The second and third sessions in May and September addressed issues relating to electricity, water, and sewage. These sessions are jointly sponsored by Brazil''s National Bank for Economic and Social Development; the government of São Paulo; the Getulio Vargas Foundation; and the Tiete Parana Development Agency, a nonprofit development group.
Each session brought together approximately 70 senior officials from the public and private sectors for three days of intensive training on privatization, regulation, and management of public infrastructure. Using 12 new cases specifically written for this program, Kennedy School faculty illustrated critical issues in privatization and highlighted successful and unsuccessful efforts at privatization. With support from the Inter-American Development Bank, this program will be expanded to encompass all of Latin America, excluding the Caribbean and Mexico. The first two sessions will be held in January and July 1998, and will include faculty from throughout the university.
Through these initiatives the Kennedy School intends to develop a comprehensive infrastructure program that will be immensely valuable to leaders in infrastructure management worldwide.
V. National Park Service Project
In 1991-92 the Kennedy School faculty helped the National Park Service shape a policy and management agenda for the Service''s next 25 years. This effort culminated in a conference in Vail, Colorado, that brought together 600 individuals from the NPS and other key interest groups and organizations. The product of this gathering— the Vail Agenda— has served as a blueprint for changing the policies and programs of the nation''s parks.
Following the publication of the Vail Agenda, several members of the Kennedy School''s faculty facilitated a series of meetings among senior NPS officials on the future organizational structure of the Park Service. These meetings resulted in a plan for a major reorganization of the Service, which was implemented in 1995 and 1996.
The National Park Service is still confronted with major problems: one of the most serious is the ever-growing backlog of capital needs, which could be as much as $6 billion. At the request of the Park Service, the Kennedy School held a roundtable in May 1997 in which senior NPS staff and faculty from both the Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School explored financial options for dealing with these capital needs. Working with five or six senior faculty, researchers will produce a series of short reports in the fall of 1997.
Other Initiatives
In November 1997 ENRP will release the final report of the Industrial Ecology Project, chaired by William Clark and Robert Frosch. This report culminates three years of research on how metal industries manage flows of waste material. Where do the metal wastes go? Are they reused, disposed of, or recycled? What are the incentives and disincentives for reuse in the system? And how can public policymakers increase these incentives? This research represents one of the first efforts to gather empirical data on how major industry uses and disposes of its waste.
Assistant Professor Cary Coglianese continued his research on the effectiveness of regulatory reforms, focusing on the U.S. EPA''s initiatives such as negotiated role making, reforms in enforcement procedures, and risk regulation.
Finally, the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, located in the Business and Government Center and chaired by Professor William Hogan, continues its work on electricity restructuring. Members of the ENRP faculty and staff have been active participants in this effort.
Publications
Discussion Papers
Agrawala, Shardul, "Explaining the Evolution of the IPCC Structure and Process, Discussion Paper (August 1997)
Coglianese, Cary, "Assessing Consensus: The Promise and Performance of Negotiated Rulemaking" (May 1997)
Fisher-Vanden, Karen, "International Policy Instrument Prominence in the Climate Change Debate: A Case Study of the United States" (August 1997)
Franz, Wendy E., "The Development of an International Agenda for Climate Change: Connecting Science to Policy" (August 1997)
Global Environmental Assessment Project, "A Critical Evaluation of Global Environmental Assessment: The Climate Experience" (September 1997)
Kandlikar, Milind and Ambuj Sagar, "Climate Change Science and Policy: Lessons from India" (August 1997)
Keohane, Nathaniel, Richard Revesz, and Robert Stavins, "The Positive Political Economy of Instrument Choice in Environmental Policy" (July 1997)
Long, Marybeth and Alastair Iles, "Assessing Climate Change Impacts: Co-evolution of Knowledge, Communities, and Methodologies" (August 1997)
Meade, Andre and Sydney Rosen, "The Mixed-Grass Prairie Reserve: Managing the Greater Badlands Region as a Whole System" (March 1996)
Parson, Edward A. and Karen Fisher-Vanden, "Joint Implementation and Its Alternatives" (June 1997)
Patt, Anthony G., Assessing Extreme Outcomes: The Strategic Treatment of Low Probability Impacts of Climate Change" (August 1997)
Stavins, Robert, "Economic Incentives for Environmental Regulation" (May 1997)
Stavins, Robert, "Policy Instruments for Climate Change: How Can National Governments Address a Global Problem?" (December 1996)
Stavins, Robert and Brad Whitehead, "The Next Generation of Market-Based Environmental Policies" (December 1996)
Wright, Janice C., "''Bright Lines'' and the Value of Life: Resolving the Dispute over the Regulation of Carcinogens"(June 1997)
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