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  MIT Project on Environmental Politics & Policy

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Environmental Protection

Wetland Wildlife Habitat Conservation

 

 

Community-Based Environmental Protection
Local communities are increasingly being asked to shoulder the burden of evaluating the risks, benefits, and costs of environmental protection. Specifically, they are asked to make decisions that exchange local environmental quality and ecological values (such as wildlife habitat) for improvements in local economic quality.

This new research effort, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, explores how local governments and communities respond to complex scientific-technical issues in managing local environmental problems.

Do local communities have the expertise and resources to properly evaluate the environmental risks and tradeoffs that confront them?

Can adjacent local communities independently implement sound environmental policies that cumulate to better environmental protection?

Does local environmental "control" mean surrendering policy to powerful local economic interests or "not in my back yard (NIMBY)" zealots?

      To address these questions, we analyze the implementation of Massachusetts’ Wetlands Protection Act (MWPA), which has existed as a “natural experiment” in community-based efforts to protect the environment for over 20 years.  We examine two contrasting forms of community-based environmental protection (CBEP):  (non-bylaw) communities versus (bylaw) communities.  The non-bylaw approach is a “weak” form of CBEP in which town (volunteer) conservation commissions act as an implementing agents for the state Department of Environmental Protection, where state regulations and oversight strongly proscribe local environmental decision-making (189 towns) in protecting wetlands.  In contrast the bylaw approach is a “strong” form of CBEP where town (volunteer) conservation commissions act to protect wetlands under their own locally-produced bylaws and rules, independent of state regulations and oversight (161 towns).

      It is the comparison of these two forms that interests us. In a broad-based statistical analysis we are examining the record of wetlands protection across all 351 Massachusetts towns.  Combining graphic information system (GIS) data, site-specific wetlands permitting data, and community socio-economic data we address the questions posed above in the specific context of wetlands protection.

      Our analytic approach involves four innovations over existing studies.  First and foremost we devise a set of consistent, reliable, and substantively meaningful measures of environmental performance across communities. Second, we set up a design that controls for the many confounding influences and characteristics that have plagued the analytic utility of prior scholarship on CBEP.  Third, and derived from the above, we devise consistent and rigorous measures for categorizing communities most directly relevant to evaluating environmental decision-making.  Fourth we study a single environmental domain – wetlands – that is broadly salient to community development policy and politics.