The Johns Hopkins University Press will publish a book in December by Edwin T. Haefele, director of RFF's regional and urban studies program, entitled Representative Government and Environmental Management. The following is a brief preview.
We have been making collective decisions since man emerged as a social animal. Civilized man has developed three ways of making them consciously. In the first way, we decide upon a rule and enforce its structures on everyone. Such rules are apt to be concerned with man's relationship to other men and to spring from cultural and religious origins. The judicial system evolved from such rules.
A second way we make collective decisions is to elect a man and agree to follow him (so long as he does not violate our rules). The selection of war chiefs and hunting leaders exemplified this method in primitive times. Executive government evolved from these roots.
A third way we make collective decisions is to come together in council, assembly, or parliament. In this way we chanced everything. Here we changed our rules, overthrew our leaders, and consciously grappled with our futures ourselves. Legislative government grew from these convocations.
It may be observed that the law is uppermost in common-property resources when we do not have a goal; that executive government is uppermost when we have an implicit consensus on the goal and are focused primarily on choosing efficient policies to bring it about; and that the legislature is uppermost when we are trying consciously to set goals.
This generalization helps to explain the postwar movement of public policy concerning common-property resources. In the 1950s and early 1960s we had an implicit consensus on our goal—economic development—and our attention was focused on developing efficient means. The perfection of benefit-cost techniques and other determinate problem-solving algorithms and their adoption by executive government agencies took place during these years. The general feeling, among professional analysts, was that if the most efficient means of managing a river basin were not chosen it was either that the range of technical options explored was not large enough (single-technology bureaucracies) or that the technical process was "corrupted" by political considerations.
In the 1960s the process of making social choices through technical choice mechanisms broke down almost completely, just as the mechanisms were at their peak of technical competence. The process broke down because the implicit consensus that supported it—agreement on economic development as the primary goal—came apart. People began to focus on the quality as well as the quantity of economic development. Overuse of common-property resources, for example, the air mantle, made many aware that no longer could these resources be ignored in the quest for economic progress. Once the goal was called into question, the useful role of executive government diminished. The action is now elsewhere. The action is in the courts, because we do not have a goal. In the absence of a goal, we must fall back on rules of general behavior. Besides the general and long unused strictures that provided handles for environmentalists who wanted to slow "progress," lawyers shaped the always malleable common-law heritage into a formidable club with which to challenge executive government agencies. Every local, state, and federal agency finds itself hip-deep in lawsuits and other legal proceedings that effectively hinder action of any sort. It is the genius of the law that when a consensus has broken down, people can use it to find ways of stopping the body politic from continuing to act on the old consensus.
But, while the law can stop us, it cannot start us in a new direction. For that we need a new goal, and a new goal is set through legislative processes that have not yet taken place. I am, of course, aware that exceptions exist to that assertion. The 1954 court decision about racial segregation started us in a new direction and presidential leadership sometimes determines new social goals. I do not deny the truth of the exceptions, but I do maintain that they are exceptions.
At present our legislative processes are in a state of disarray—a disarray of at least two dimensions. First, the national legislature has, for reasons that need not concern us here, gradually formed itself into a mirror of executive agencies; that is to say, it has committee counterparts to the executive agencies. As a result, the legislature has lost its ability to act as a committee of the whole, to choose among conflicting priorities, to make judgments across substantive fields, and to operate as the primary marketplace for bargaining, vote trading, and accommodation across a broad range of issues. As a result, the grand trading arena envisioned by Madison has become a series of small trading guilds with all the exclusiveness and insularity that a guild implies.
Second, below the federal level, our problems and people have escaped the boundaries of general-purpose governments. Neither the scope, resources, nor interest remains in many present general-purpose governments to deal with problems of common-property resources. Most people live in one or another of our major metropolitan areas. They move frequently and can have no lasting impact on the small jurisdictions in which they occasionally vote or in the larger metropolitan area that has only informal government. Of course, the actions of every household in its economic role influence the shape and structure of the city. We are, however, discussing collective decisions, not the ordinary reactions to market forces. Higher-level executive government and the law have provided, for some time, the only government available in metropolitan areas. Neither one has a warrant for setting goals.
Some of the resurgence of initiative and referendum voting—both primitive methods of setting goals—can be attributed to the absence of general-purpose legislatures on a scale appropriate to our problems. What that scale is should be a matter of high technical and political interest.
A more radical indictment of the legislature, or indeed, of all three ways of making social choices, could be made. It is that all three systems have broken down because of the inordinate power of corporations and of money to influence outcomes. The power, which can be used to hire the best lawyers, to finance political campaigns, and to provide elaborate lobbying efforts, is undeniable. The adjective inordinate is applied when the power is used to produce outcomes not supported by some segments of the population. It is also inordinate if, in fact, it preempts the public space, setting the agenda and denying other problems even access to the public decision-making process.
If this indictment is taken seriously, it draws us back to the rule-making stage and forces us to examine not only our goals, but also our process for setting goals. Reforms that would give equal access to the law, stop private funding of political campaigns, create advocacy planning and build in an adversary system in large bureaucracies would be in order. We have, indeed, raised a demon when we begin to question how our common-property resources should be governed.
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1973 issue of Resources magazine.
