ET455 Environmental Policy and Governance Study Guide Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts, theories, and policy frameworks from ET455, including common-pool resources, state simplification, market failures, payments for environmental services, and market-based environmental regulations.

Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin)

The overuse and degradation of a shared resource that occurs when individuals act in their own rational self-interest, capturing nearly all the benefits of resource extraction while distributing the shared costs across all users.

"No technical solution" (Hardin)

The proposition that certain systemic problems cannot be resolved through technological innovation alone because they stem from fundamental human values, behavior, and social incentives.

Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon (Hardin)

Socially established rules and sanctions agreed upon by resource users that restrict individual freedoms to preserve a shared commons from depletion.

Legibility (Scott)

The state-driven process of simplifying complex societies and natural ecosystems to make them visible, measurable, categorized, standardized, and controllable.

Scientific forestry (Scott)

A historical Prussian forestry method that transformed complex, biodiverse forest ecosystems into standardized, countable monocultures optimized solely for timber revenue.

Administrative rationalism (Dryzek)

An environmental management discourse relying on scientific expertise, hierarchical government agencies (such as the EPA, NPS, BLM, NOAA, and USGS), and bureaucratic procedures rather than citizen participation.

Problem displacement (Dryzek)

The shifting of an environmental problem from one medium to another (e.g., from air to water) caused by fragmented, specialized bureaucratic agency structures that fail to view nature as interconnected.

Shadow pricing (Dryzek)

A technique utilized in cost-benefit and risk analyses that assigns artificial monetary values to non-market entities, such as rivers, clean air, or human lives.

Three assumptions about community (Agrawal and Gibson)

The problematic conceptualizations of community as a small geographic area, as socially homogeneous, and as sharing uniform conservation norms.

Mexican Community Forest Enterprises (CFEs) (Bray and Duran)

Community-owned forestry businesses founded on communal land rights granted under Mexico's 1917 Constitution that successfully balance commercial timber production with biodiversity conservation and carbon storage.

Five types of capital in Mexican community forestry (Bray and Duran)

The state-provided foundational assets supporting Community Forest Enterprises: natural, human, physical, financial, and social capital.

Common-pool resource (CPR) design principles (Ostrom)

Eight institutional conditions found in enduring self-governing resource regimes: clear boundaries, congruence with local conditions, collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms, recognition of rights to organize, and nested enterprises.

Excludable good (Daly and Farley)

A good or resource whose physical characteristics, legal property rights, and institutions allow potential users to be effectively prevented from accessing or consuming it.

Rival good (Daly and Farley)

A good whose consumption or use by one individual diminishes the amount or quality available to others.

Congestible resource (Daly and Farley)

A resource that exhibits nonrival characteristics at low levels of usage but becomes rival and subject to scarcity and degradation when demand increases (e.g., roads or beaches).

Open-access resource (Daly and Farley)

A resource that is rival in consumption but nonexcludable, lacking institutional property rights or communal access rules, which creates strong incentives for competitive overexploitation.

Pure public good (Daly and Farley)

A good that is both nonrival and nonexcludable, meaning one individual's use does not subtract from another's and non-payers cannot be excluded from receiving its benefits.

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) (Engel, Pagiola, and Wunder)

A voluntary transaction in which a well-defined environmental service or land use is bought by at least one buyer from at least one provider under the strict condition that the service is delivered.

User-financed PES (Engel, Pagiola, and Wunder)

A payments for environmental services arrangement where the direct beneficiaries of the ecological service (e.g., a downstream hydropower utility) pay the upstream providers directly.

Government-financed PES (Engel, Pagiola, and Wunder)

A payments for environmental services scheme where the government pays land managers on behalf of the public, typically employed for public goods with numerous dispersed beneficiaries.

Negative externality (Nordhaus)

An uncompensated cost generated by production or consumption that is imposed on third parties outside the commercial transaction, such as fossil fuel emissions driving climate change.

Carbon pricing (Nordhaus)

An economic policy tool implemented via a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system that places an explicit monetary cost on greenhouse gas emissions to realign market incentives.

Cap-and-trade

An environmental policy instrument in which the government establishes an aggregate emissions ceiling and issues or auctions tradable allowances that firms can buy and sell to achieve compliance flexibly.

SO2 Allowance Trading Program (Stavins and Schmalensee)

A market-based cap-and-trade system created under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments designed to cost-effectively curtail sulfur dioxide emissions and combat acid rain.

Cooperative/voluntary approaches (Harrison)

Policy frameworks where government agencies and commercial enterprises collaborate through negotiated agreements or voluntary performance goals instead of mandatory command-and-control standards.

Command-and-control regulation

A conventional regulatory approach wherein the government prescribes uniform legal limits, operational standards, or specific abatement technologies that regulated entities must follow.