Disproportionality in Design and Impact: Ensuring Equity When Developing and Implementing Environmental Policies

Abstract

The purpose of this brief is to highlight the importance of looking at the distributional effects of environmental policies as they are being implemented to achieve their ultimate goal(s). It focuses on recent study that attempts to measure disproportionate effects during the implementation of a policy, rather than looking solely at the effects after the policy has been fully implemented. Much of the evaluative literature on environmental policy tends to focus on effects and impacts after policy implementation. But if we are to fully consider the importance of equity as we think about large-scale policy interventions for issues such as climate change, which carry embedded disproportionate impacts, then we likely need to more fully measure policy impacts at all phases: planning, design, implementation, and evaluation. One way of doing this is by examining disproportionality impacts of discrete environmental policies at a smaller scale. What follows is an overview of recent research into sulfur distributions during the implementation of the Federal Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (sulfur cap-and-trade program), and linking that work to issues of equity and resilience for climate change policy development.