The bifurcation of science and values continues to implicate Colorado’s natural resource extraction policies and procedures. Historically, top-down legalism has governed regulatory processes in Colorado, however, communities and regional governments have long advocated for self-governance, and grassroots campaigns have been at the forefront of this juncture in state politics.
To this end, call-to-action campaigns have backed adaptive policies like the 2011 hydraulic fracturing chemical disclosure rule in attempts to guard political, social, and environmental interests.
Up until the compromise between Gov. John Hickenlooper and Rep. Jared Polis which removed all anti-fracking initiatives from the November 2014 ballot a proliferation of citizen-led campaigns, predominantly under the purview Food and Water Watch, successfully helped cities like Boulder pass moratoriums against fracking.
These campaigns exemplify why community-based collaboration, and adaptive management policies channel political capital through public participation. Finally, Colorado allocates local authority through Home Rule and citizen ballot initiatives, therefore City Council, and governing bodies such as the Water Quality Control Commission (WQCC), must look beyond market-based regulatory strategies.
Colorado citizens have reiterated concerns the Governor’s Fracking Task Force will be largely influenced by the oil and gas industry due to a biased representation of interests, and many are unaccustomed to provisions of the 2011 chemical disclosure rule. Therefore, in order to defend the public good it is imperative to increase the frequency and length of public comment periods and stakeholder discussions. To this end, regulatory tax incentives send ineffective price signals, and often encourage adverse behavior such as industry tax evasion.
Meanwhile, information disclosure, and accountability measures optimize pollution reduction across firms by increasing a firm’s susceptibility to legal ramifications, as well as encourage investor and/or employee agency in reporting and enforcement, which ultimately limits pollution outputs. In the absence of information the citizenry will only denounce government, thus widening asymmetry between the public and private sector, and increasing procedural and environmental injustice.
As states continue to expand facilitative regulations, grassroots campaigning strengthens the power of individual interests, and encourages policy change and decision making over time. Policy communities, increasingly, advocate for voluntary programs, information dissemination, and claim trust and reputation are effective incentives in regulatory compliance, and in modern policy designs.
Finally, aside from conventional enforcement theory which stresses the importance of sanctions and threats, firms are more likely to comply through cooperative agreements, institutions of trust, and reputational controls. Moreover, current research related to heuristics, or informal rules guiding decision making, speaks to how citizens, government, and industry cooperate through the enhancement of compliance rhetoric, access to information, and through the congruency of local government goals and policy outcomes.
In the advent of a third epoch of environmental policy, public participation is contingent upon the endurance, and at times, the adaptation of institutional rules and regulations governing both civil society and the private sector. Further, institutional change occurs through the changing preferences and expectations of policy actors driven by informal rules, which are often innate within governance regimes. Cooperative governance schemes set the stage for policy implementers to craft, and enforce politically and socially-sound compliance outcomes; providing greater levels of trust and cooperation between principles and agents in society.
Recent reports in Colorado suggest oil and gas firms respond to voluntary carbon disclosure policies, and are more likely to alter their pollution control standards to new environmental performance targets well before the government intervenes. In addition, many regulatory agencies have no practical alternative to voluntary compliance measures, mainly due to budgetary constraints.
Thus, there is great opportunity for the City Council to improve its political and social capacity in Colorado by maximizing the widespread potential of public participation programs through the venue of grassroots movements, right-to-know campaigns, and disclosure agreements. The City Council and other regulatory commissions at the forefront of environmental politics must act now to prevent procedural and social inequities in the policy process.
Ali Kent is a recent graduate of the MPA program at the University of Colorado Denver. She is currently interning at CDOT, and is starting a fellowship with the House Majority Project.
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