CHAPTER 10 NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ACT: ENHANCING COLLABORATION AND PARTNERSHIPS

• Jurisdiction: United States

National Environmental Policy Act
(Oct 2010)
CHAPTER 10
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ACT: ENHANCING COLLABORATION AND PARTNERSHIPS
P. Lynn Scarlett
Resources for the Future
Washington, D.C.

P. LYNN SCARLETT, former Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Department of the Interior from 2005-2009, is a Visiting Scholar at Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C. and an environmental analyst working on climate change adaptation, ecosystem services, water issues, landscape-scale conservation, and science and decision making. In 2009, she served as a Visiting Lecturer on climate change at the University of California Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. She became Deputy Secretary of the Interior Department after serving for 4 years as the Department's Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget. She served as Acting Secretary of the Department for two months in 2006. Ms. Scarlett chaired the Department's Climate Change Task Force and now serves on the national Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests. Ms. Scarlett is author of numerous publications on incentive-based environmental policies. Her most recent publication, "Green, Clean, and Dollar Smart," on urban greening, was published in February 2010 by the Environmental Defense Fund. Ms. Scarlett serves on the board of the American Hiking Society, the Continental Divide Trail Alliance, and RESOLVE (non-profit environmental dispute resolution), and is a trustee emeritus of the Udall Foundation. She received her B.A. and M.A. in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also completed her Ph.D. coursework and exams in political science and political economy. She is an avid hiker, canoe enthusiast, and birder.

Forty years ago, the Nation enacted the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In the intervening years, the Act has become the bedrock for evaluating environmental and other social and economic impacts of federal actions. Equally significant, the Act lays out the central architecture for agency collaboration, cooperation, and public participation in evaluating federal actions. In its 1997 report reviewing 25 years of NEPA in action, the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) opined that the Act's "most enduring legacy is as a framework for collaboration between federal agencies and those who will bear the environmental, social, and economic impacts of agency decisions."ⁱ

Among five key elements of the NEPA process identified in the CEQ report as critical to its effective implementation, three pertain, at least in part, to participation and collaboration. These three elements include NEPA's role in facilitating: 1) public information and input; 2) interagency coordination; and 3) interdisciplinary place-based approaches to decision making.ⁱⁱ

NEPA and associated implementing regulations established a participatory and collaborative decision-making architecture. Yet achieving robust public participation and collaborative engagement has been a four-decade evolutionary and sometimes rocky journey. Though the Act laid the foundations for participation and collaboration, its critics, over four decades, have pointed to missed opportunities and, sometimes, an emphasis on procedural fidelity rather than meaningful collaboration.ⁱⁱⁱ

In a 25-year retrospective, for example, participants in a CEQ review of the Act offered a number of critiques.^iv These critiques included:

o A sense that the process sometimes treated the public and other agencies as adversaries rather than welcome participants;

o Lack of consistency in timetables, modes of public participation, and other requirements has hampered interagency coordination;

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o Public and other agency participation often has occurred too late to be fully effective to enhance strategic planning through NEPA processes.

Others criticized NEPA processes as failing to achieve a scope of citizen involvement reflective of broad societal interests.^v Others pointed to participation limited to commentary at public hearings or through written responses to agency...