Knowledge and Environmental Policy

An analysis of the challenges involved in incorporating science and other kinds of knowledge into making environmental policy.

During the George W. Bush administration, politics and ideology routinely trumped scientific knowledge in making environmental policy. Data were falsified, reports were edited selectively, and scientists were censored. The Obama administration has pledged to restore science to the policy making process. And yet, as the authors of Knowledge and Environmental Policy point out, the problems in connecting scientific discovery to science-based policy are systemic. The process—currently structured in a futile effort to separate policy from science—is dysfunctional in many respects.

William Ascher, Toddi Steelman, and Robert Healy analyze the dysfunction and offer recommendations for incorporating formal science and other important types of knowledge…