Performance Track’s Postmortem: Lessons from the Rise and Fall of EPA’s “Flagship” Voluntary Program
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2014
Abstract
For nearly a decade, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) considered its National Environmental Performance Track to be its “flagship” voluntary program — even a model for transforming the conventional system of environmental regulation. Since Performance Track’s founding during the Clinton Administration, EPA officials repeatedly claimed that the program’s rewards attracted hundreds of the nation’s “top” environmental performers and induced these businesses to make significant environmental gains beyond legal requirements. Although EPA eventually disbanded Performance Track early in the Obama Administration, the program has been subsequently emulated by a variety of state and federal regulatory authorities. To discern lessons useful for similar voluntary programs, we report here the findings from a multipronged, multi-year research effort assessing business participation in Performance Track. We find no evidence to support the sweeping assertions EPA made about the program’s achievements. Facilities participating in Performance Track simply could not be shown to be top performers. Rather, what most distinguished these participants was a factor distinct from environmental quality, namely their propensity to engage in outreach with government and community groups. Furthermore, drawing on an extensive analysis of business participation in Performance Track and other EPA voluntary programs, we show how Performance Track faced inherent limitations in its ability to induce any dramatic environmental gains, making its model more of a poor substitute for the conventional regulatory system than a plausible means for the system’s transformation.
Keywords
Environmental law and policy, environmental economics, empirical legal studies, public policy analysis, corporate social responsibility, voluntary programs, OSHA, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, Climate Leaders, Energy Star, National Environmental Performance Track, substitutes for regulation
Publication Title
Harvard Environmental Law Review
Repository Citation
Coglianese, Cary and Nash, Jennifer, "Performance Track’s Postmortem: Lessons from the Rise and Fall of EPA’s “Flagship” Voluntary Program" (2014). All Faculty Scholarship. 1233.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1233
Included in
Administrative Law Commons, American Politics Commons, Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Environmental Law Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Political Economy Commons, Public Policy Commons
Publication Citation
38 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 1 (2014).