Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Policy innovation, policy consolidation, policy monopoly, policy collapse, and policy replacement are five unique
phases in the policy cycle. These five phases can be traced in any policy arena through a set of issues. Each issue
and its policy arena have unique time sequences and political events which mark the transition zones between the
phases. For example, agricultural land can be in policy replacement while mining lands are firmly entrenched in
policy monopoly, that is, homesteading on agricultural land can be discontinued by executive order 60 years before
mining lands were removed from location.
Where do coal fires fit in the environmental protection policy monopoly? The scientific understanding that coal
fires contribute to greenhouse gases came too late to be incorporated into the clean air and clean water templates
developed in monopoly condition in the 1970s (Kraft, 2007). This particular policy monopoly was being
dismantled by election results in the 1980s, and was moribund by the 1990s. Coal fires did not match in the
particulars of the hazards template that emerged during the policy collapse of command and control environmental
protection legislation. Nor do coal fires match the market-based solution template that gained favor in Congress at
the beginning of the twenty-first century.
During other policy phases and templates, coal-fires research could have led to the public policy outcomes
anticipated by many coal-fire researchers, that government will regulate business to encourage best practices,
and provide financial support and dampen political controversy in order to extinguish long burning coal
fires. Instead during the early years of the twenty-first century, coal fires were not even on the government
agenda.
Coal fires in the twenty-first century present a policy problem in search of a policy solution. There is no accepted
template in the legislature which can accommodate the problem with coal fires. To understand the implications of
this status, it is instructive to examine an analogous policy concern which geoscientists first introduced in the late
nineteenth century, but which required the greater part of one hundred years to move through the five policy phases
discussed here.
Policy Innovation in the Nineteenth Century
D
isposition of the public lands is a public policy that was debated in the federal government in each generation
following independence (Clawson, 1983). The predated the Constitution, but did not settle the issue for even one
generation. The question of public lands continued to emerge on the federal agenda because the problem
experienced in the country continued to evolve. What was first a problem of finance, how to use lands to
raise revenues, soon transformed into what to do with illegal settlers who moved into territories in advance of the
land sales. Later the problem of how to raise revenues and encourage settlement in the trans-Appalachian region
was subsumed in the debate about abolition. Following the civil war, the public lands policy issue was
transformed again. This time science joined the policy discussion, and we can see an example of policy
innovation.
J.W. Powell: Public Lands
Major John Wesley Powell
Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a Detailed
Account of the Lands of Utah
'
s
was presented to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz on April 1, 1878, who
passed it on to the House of Representatives two days later on April 3, 1878 (Stegner, 1954, pp. 211
-
231). The
scientific document was based on four field seasons of research from 1869 to 1972 by Powell
'
s Geographical
and Geological Survey of
the Rocky Mountain Region and its predecessor. Powell
'
s report arrived in
Washington, DC, at a time when the image of
that had described the Great Plains
in scientific reports in the early decades of the nineteenth century and in popular accounts by pioneers crossing
to Oregon and Utah in the 1840s was being reshaped. Among the boosters who publicized the findings that
settlement was beneficial to the plains was the territorial governor of Colorado, William Gilpin. Reports
that soil was rich and deep, and that
“
the great American desert
”
the
“
rain would follow the plow
”
were enthusiastically distributed
by the politically well connected Gilpin, and others (Stegner, 1954, pp. 1
8). The policy decision space in
the 45th Congress elected in 1876 was defined by these competing views of what farmers would encounter in
the arid lands as they sought to establish economically successful agricultural operations on the prairies and
high plains.
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