Please join socPie for the first meeting of 2020. Dr. Chris Rea, Assistant Professor, John Glen College of Public Affairs will be speaking, his talk title and abstract are below. The event is open to all and no RSVP is required.
Title: The Politics of Erosion? Environmental Welfare Provision and State Capacity in the United States, 1973- 2018
Abstract: Environmental welfare is the constellation of institutions and policies that provide and protect the biophysical foundations of human and non-human life and livelihoods. We assess the changing capacity of the U.S. state to provide environmental welfare in the context of growing climactic and ecological threats. First, drawing on more than 45 years of data spanning policy domains, we show that environmentally-focused a) funding and b) agency-wide staffing has either eroded or merely held steady since the 1980s. Second, by examining rich, individual-level employment data more closely, we show that even in the face of declining fiscal and human resources, many--but not all--environmental agencies have proved remarkably resilient, maintaining or even growing along several dimensions of regulatory and administrative capacity. Third and most provisionally, we theorize broad-based political-institutional mechanisms that we suspect are central to an overall ``erosive'' environmental politics; and theorize meso-level organizational dynamics that we suspect explain how and why some arms of the environmental state have proved more resilient than others.
