Grading "Sustainable America": The Report of the President's Council on Sustainable Development

With a backdrop of increased public anxieties arising from the rapid pace of global economic change, social dislocations, and degradation of the natural environment, the 1987 "Brundtland Commission" report called for "sustainable development"—development that meets the needs of the present without imperiling the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

"Sustainable America: A New Consensus for Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy Environment for the Future," the February 1996 report of the President's Council on Sustainable Development, is an ambitious, high-profile attempt to reach this goal. Appointed by President Clinton in 1993, the council was charged with conducting an open, collaborative dialogue on ways to meet the Brundtland Commission challenge. Co-chaired by a vice president of Dow Chemical and the president of the World Resources Institute, the twenty-three members of the council included representatives from business and environmental organizations, several cabinet-level officers, and members of labor, minorities, and other groups. It was supported in its activities by numerous task forces and working groups. While the council's report reflects the views only of its members and expressly states that it does not represent Clinton administration policy, the participation of several cabinet-level officers and Vice President Al Gore indicates the administration's strong interest in the issues addressed by the council.

Core Beliefs and Policy Goals

Because the council's report addresses an enormous range of topics—among them, pollution management, resource stewardship, income distribution, community planning, education, and population control—any effort to summarize its ideas will do some injustice. The report starts with sixteen core beliefs about the need for environmental, economic, and social progress and ways to achieve them. Among these beliefs are that: the United States needs integrated approaches to avoid the unintended consequences of more piecemeal policymaking; economic, environmental, and social goals are not only important but very often complementary; regulation, while important, needs to become more performance-based, and should be supplemented by greater assumption by all parties of stewardship responsibilities for the future; the United States also needs a new, more inclusive, collaborative, and "place-based" decision-making process that reflects local as well as national interests; cooperative efforts to improve communities through education, incentives, investments, and changes in development patterns are critical to a more place-based approach; and education and easier access to information are crucial to achieving policy goals and enhancing public participation.

Based on these beliefs, the council report advances ten basic policy goals and a very large number of proposed actions that address both substantive policy options and ways to reform the policy process. The council recommends changes in economic incentives, including altering subsidy and tax policies to discourage pollution, encourage natural resource protection, and promote community redevelopment. It also endorses voluntary measures for resource preservation and waste management in order to pursue these same goals. Increased flexibility in regulatory compliance is supported, provided it is accompanied by requirements for increased environmental protection. Considerable emphasis is placed on improvements in technology, business management, and worker training that would prevent pollution problems, enhance economic productivity, and expand employment possibilities.

To implement a more place-based policy approach, the council supports increased community involvement through local and regional dialogues and negotiations in which diverse stakeholder interests would be represented and accommodated. In the environmental sphere, however, these processes would be under-girded by national standards. To enhance the scientific soundness of policy actions and to encourage public participation, the council advocates the creation and promulgation of a variety of economic, social, and environmental quality indicators and educational programs. The development of these indicators remains a key element of the council's continuing activities.

Strong Points and Shortcomings

A reader will inevitably find something specific with which to disagree in a report addressing such a wide range of topics and requiring consensus among diverse points of view. Such reports also characteristically make points that are not perfectly articulated, or that sound vague but dutiful, in response to the need to contain common-ground statements.

An important consideration is whether the report as a whole brings a useful new perspective to designing effective public policies—policies for meeting a range of human needs and aspirations—with a package of recommendations that provides a useful point of departure for policy reform.

Strengths

The report underscores the need for recognizing interactions among environmental, social, and economic goals—in particular, the importance of a healthy environment to economic progress—and the importance of considering more systematically the consequences of current actions for future generations. It also provides welcome support for more aggressive use of performance-based standards and economic incentives to reduce the cost of environmental improvement and resource protection, including controversial measures such as the reduction of existing environmentally damaging subsidies. An additional strength is the report's emphasis on improved scientific knowledge and public understanding, as well as on investments in technical advance and human skills. The report further draws attention to the need for balancing local and national goals and enhancing cooperative decisionmaking.

Weaknesses

In its emphasis on strengthening environmental standards, the report advances the notion that doing so can be accomplished cheaply or can even generate economic benefits. This tends somewhat to obscure an awkward but important part of the environmental policy debate by deemphasizing situations in which greater benefits would flow from directing resources to other priorities. While it is certainly true that reduction of economic and environmental inefficiencies will in some instances generate both economic and environmental benefits, there are surely limits on the extent to which further improvements in environmental quality can be purchased without any increase in real cost. Such increased costs may well be justified by the resultant benefits in some cases, but in others—for example, large expenditures to reduce small but politically salient risks—such a conclusion is more questionable.

Further, while emphasizing how changes in the use of technology may advance environmental and economic goals, the report devotes insufficient attention to the need for continued government support of basic science and R&D that help make new technologies available. In addition, the report espouses a number of voluntary measures based on shifts in social values, although experience suggests that such measures frequently are less effective than claimed.

Some Policy Challenges

Other concerns emerge as one considers the operation of a place-based policy approach. To succeed, policies need to reflect the interests of all affected parties, not just the various activists on different sides of the debate. Achieving this participation is a significant challenge. Successful policies must address issues that cut across multiple administrative and geographical scales, and the longstanding question of how to weigh expert and lay judgments of risks and priorities in social decisionmaking must be resolved. The council's recommendations for building sustainable communities, for example, emphasize large doses of collaborative planning and potential changes in fiscal mechanisms to counter sprawl and other perceived disamenities. But achieving broad consensus on community development will also have to address the fact that many Americans really seem to prefer lower-density suburban living.