Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy

This book reviews and assesses environmental policy over the past three decades--primarily in the United States but with implications for other nations. The editors place U.S. environmental policy within the framework of the transition from 1970s-era policies that emphasized federally controlled regulation, through a period of criticism and efficiency-based reform efforts, to an emerging era of sustainability in which decisionmaking takes place increasingly at the local and regional levels. The book looks at what does and does not work and how social, economic, and environmental goals can be integrated through policy strategies grounded in the concept of sustainability.