As environmental issues continue to become more prevalent in society and surrounding policy challenges become more complex, Environmental Policy once again brings together top scholars to evaluate the changes and continuities in American environmental policy since the late 1960s and their implications for current policy. Students will learn to decipher the underlying trends, institutional constraints, and policy dilemmas that shape today’s environmental politics as they evaluate approaches to future challenges.
Michael E. Kraft is professor emeritus of political science
and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Green
Bay. He is the author of, among other works, Environmental
Policy and Politics, 8th ed. (2022), and coauthor of
Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental
Performance (2011), with Mark Stephan and Troy D. Abel.
In addition, he is the coeditor of Environmental Policy:
New Directions in the 21st Century, 12th ed. (2025), with
Barry G. Rabe and Norman J. Vig; Toward Sustainable
Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy, 2nd ed. (2009), with
Daniel A. Mazmanian; and Business and Environmental Policy: Corporate Interests in the
American Political System (2007) and The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy (2013),
with Sheldon Kamieniecki. For over forty years, he taught courses in environmental policy and
politics, American government, Congress, and public policy analysis.
Barry G. Rabe is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy and the
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Environmental Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School
of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He also serves as a nonresident senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution and as a fellow of the National Academy of Public
Administration. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Statehouse
and Greenhouse: The Emerging Politics of American Climate Change Policy (Brookings,
2004), which received the 2017 Martha Derthick Book Award from the American
Political Science Association for making a lasting contribution to the study of federalism.
His latest books are Can We Price Carbon? (MIT Press, 2018) and Trump, the
Administrative Presidency, and Federalism (Brookings, 2020), coauthored with Frank J.
Thompson and Kenneth K. Wong, and he is currently working on a book examining
the politics of short-lived climate pollutants such as methane.
Norman J. Vig is the Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor of Science, Technology,
and Society emeritus at Carleton College. He has written extensively on environmental
policy, science and technology policy, and comparative politics and is coeditor
with Michael G. Faure of Green Giants? Environmental Policies of the United States
and the European Union (MIT Press, 2004) and with Regina S. Axelrod and David
Leonard Downie of The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy, 2nd ed.
(CQ Press, 2005).
