The public policy process has five stages, depending on who you listen to. Here they are:
- agenda setting
- policy formation
- policy adoption
- policy implementation
- policy evaluation
All begins with an item on the governments' agenda. This involves defining a condition as a problem that actually has a solution that can be addressed by governmental policy. Sometimes this takes time, as was the case of environmental policy. Here is a story regarding an event that led to the passage of the:
- National Environmental Policy Act.
And the creation of the
- Environmental Protection Agency.
by an executive order passed by Richard Nixon.
The event described below - a river catching fire - had happened many times before. Why did this particular event lead to governmental action while the previous ones did not? Its a good question, the article attempts to answer it.
Keep in mind that the growing influence of the environmental movement - which helped spur the creation of the EPA - was part of what the Powell Memo complained about.
Related concepts:
- Window of Opportunity.
- Independent Executive Agency.
- Negative Externalities.
For the article: The Cuyahoga River Caught Fire at Least a Dozen Times, but No One Cared Until 1969.
Everyone knew the river was polluted, but nobody much cared. If anything, it was a badge of honor. As David Newton writes in Chemistry of the Environment, “Fundamentally this level of environmental degradation was accepted as a sign of success.”
In 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948 and 1952 the river caught fire, writes Laura La Bella in Not Enough to Drink: Pollution, Drought, and Tainted Water Supplies. Those are some of the incidents we’re aware of; it’s hard to say how many other times oil slicks may have ignited, as press coverage and fire department records were both inconsistent. But not all the fires were as innocuous as that of 1969. Some caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage and killed people. But even with the obvious toll on the landscape, regulation of industry was limited at best. It seemed more important to keep the economy booming, the city growing and people working. This attitude was reflected in cities around the country. The Cuyahoga was far from the only river to catch fire during the period. Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo and Galveston all used different methods to disperse oil on their waters in order to prevent fires.
But the tide began to turn in the 1950s, according to the Stradlings. Between 1952 and 1969, Cleveland lost about 60,000 manufacturing jobs. Deindustrialization took hold alongside the Civil Rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. “Over the years, Clevelanders were hardly complacent about the burning river, but not until the 1970s did they begin to think of its meaning in anything other than economic turns,” the Stradlings write. “That the Cuyahoga fire evolved into one of the great disasters of the environmental crisis tells us something about Americans’ growing suspicion of industrial landscapes, a suspicion encouraged by the decreasing benefits they derived from such places.”
