FYI. Apologies for duplicates due to cross-posting.
Stefanie
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 16:04:33 -0600
From: Mark Stoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: REVIEW: Watt on Shaiko, _Voices and Echoes for the Environment_
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Send reply to: "American Society for Environmental History (H-NET List)"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[This review appeared on H-Pol. --Ed.]
Ronald G. Shaiko. _Voices and Echoes for the Environment: Public Interest
Representation in the 1990s and Beyond_. Series on Power, Conflict, and
Democracy: American Politics into the Twenty-first Century, Robert Y.
Shapiro, series ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xvi + 300
pp. Tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $49.50 (cloth), ISBN
0-231-11354-4; $21.00 (paper), ISBN 0-231-11355-2.
Reviewed by Laura A. Watt, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and
Management, University of California at Berkeley. Published by H-Pol
(March, 2000)
The Challenges of Environmental Representation in aCheckbook-Activist World
The environmental movement in the United States has undergone extensive
changes since its emergence in the 1960s. A major element of these shifts
has been the evolution of non-profit environmental advocacy groups from
scrappy upstarts to national-scale, institutionalized, professionalized
public interest organizations. In the context of these changes, this book
explores the relationships between organization leaders ("voices") and
their informed memberships ("echoes"), using a variety of research
methodologies. In particular, author Ronald Shaiko asks how these groups
balance administrative concerns, such as the maintenance of memberships and
organizational infrastructure, with their overarching goals of providing
effective political representation in the environmental policy-making
process. In doing so, Shaiko provides fascinating detail into the current
dilemmas facing these groups, yet falls a bit short of making substantive
recommendations for improvement.
Shaiko deftly sets the stage for his research in the first two chapters,
giving an engaging history of the development of the major environmental
non-profits and the shifting political contexts in which they have evolved.
One of the most important elements is a change in American public interest
activism as a whole since the 1960s: rather than taking to the streets or
getting arrested to push for social change, many people today conduct their
"activism" primarily by writing membership checks to organizations. Less
social and spontaneous than in the past, this style of participation
passively follows the guidance of professional organizations and their
leaders; members provide political legitimacy through their numbers and
financial support through their donations, but often do not have much more
direct involvement. A much larger political enterprise is possible as a
result; more than 3,000 autonomous national non-profits covering a wide
variety of interests now compete to represent their own particular version
of "the public interest." In order to succeed in effectively advocating
environmental concerns in this context, Shaiko argues that "the messages
sent directly to policy makers from organization leaders and their
lobbyists -- the 'voices' -- must be supported by similarly informed
messages from the grassroots memberships -- the 'echoes'" (p. 4).
Yet the organizations themselves have also grown, and this growth has
created new challenges in representation. Particularly during the 1980s,
both the membership rolls and annual budgets of most environmental groups
soared to all-time highs; in response the organizations expanded their
operations and professionalized their staffs. Changes in tax law also often
required complex organizational adjustments to continue to lobby for change
while retaining the tax-exempt status of a 501�(3) organization. As
national environmental organizations evolved, the costs of maintaining
their day-to-day operations and, more important, of maintaining membership
bases in an increasingly competitive public interest marketplace have
markedly shifted organizational resources toward maintenance of the
organization and, as a consequence, away from public interest
representation. Leaders are now faced with difficult decisions about how to
allocate their resources "supplied, in large part, by members committed to
public interest goals rather than to the maintenance of public interest
organizations" (p. 21).
The bulk of the text contains detailed analyses of organizational
attributes, leadership styles, leadership communications with members,
recruitment efforts, membership motivations, and leadership-membership
political activities, using interviews, analysis of existing survey data,
and content analysis. Because environmental groups vary so widely, Shaiko
specifically investigates five case studies as a representative sample to
"capture the internal diversity in substantive policy agendas,
organizational structures, leadership styles, membership size,
organizational wealth, and longevity" (p. 39). The five organizations
studied here are: Sierra Club, one of the oldest and most structurally
complex groups, with unusually direct links between members and leadership;
National Wildlife Federation (NWF), an "environmental conglomerate" with
very loose connections to its affiliated members; The Wilderness Society,
with a narrow policy focus on preservation issues and few constituent
services; Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), made up primarily of scientists
and lawyers interested in market-based solutions to environmental problems;
and Environmental Action (EA), a collective-based group which ceased
operations in 1996. (Due to the significant differences in institutional
structure, connections with members and/or staffing between national groups
and regional or local grassroots groups, the latter are not included in
this study.) Shaiko's study follows these groups through the boom of the
1980s, fueled in large part by the anti-environmentalist policies of
President Ronald Reagan, and the bust of the early 1990s, when most groups
drastically downsized and streamlined their operations in response to an
economic recession and shrinking memberships.
The author provides a great deal of intriguing data and analysis, but his
conclusions do not take full advantage of this complexity. In some ways his
efforts are confounded by methodological problems. For example, the survey
data on membership motivations presented in Chapter Five is twenty years
old. Shaiko asserts that the motivations for belonging to public interest
organizations and the incentives offered by organization leaders have not
changed much in that time, but provides no concrete evidence for this
conclusion. Given the extent and persuasiveness of his documentation of
radical changes in the overall context and structure of most of these
groups, this argument is somewhat unconvincing. Similarly, in Chapter Four,
his method of analyzing the content of membership recruitment by the
organizations is to examine the direct mail solicitations he himself
received over a two-year period. This strikes me as unnecessarily
haphazard; there may have been certain types of groups that simply did not
have him on their mailing lists, and thus are underrepresented in his
analysis. A more systematic approach to gathering direct-mail data would be
more persuasive.
More importantly, Shaiko does not draw upon the variation in success or
failure among his five cases to put forward substantive proposals for
change. He argues, among other things, that in order to be effective,
environmental leaders must restructure their organizations to place policy
influence ahead of organizational maintenance. Yet his data show that this
prioritization is exactly what is increasingly difficult for these groups
to do, due in part to the ever-increasing costs and competitiveness of
recruiting and retaining both members and professional, well-paid staff.
The one organization in his five cases that attempted to stay focused most
exclusively on policy influence, Environmental Action, is ironically the
one that ultimately went out of business. In addition, some organizations
managed to continue to expand their memberships through the early 1990s
(EDF, National Parks and Conservation Association, and The Nature
Conservancy are three examples), yet Shaiko provides no analysis as to why
these groups had greater success than others. Concrete suggestions as to
how organization leaders might best solve these kinds of dilemmas, given
the different experiences of his five cases, would greatly strengthen his
conclusions.
It also seems that much could be gained from examining some of the
differences in motivation and structure between organizations, rather than
looking at them as elements of a single group. For example, one could argue
that a major distinction between groups is the way in which they define
"representation of the public interest," similar to the "principle-agent"
question with regard to legislators.[1] Do they see themselves as literally
representing the public's current concerns, issues people are actively
interested in right now, or are they more intent on advancing their own
normative view of what is best for the environment and society in the long
run, regardless of the public's current focus? One of Shaiko's cases
provides an example of the latter approach; EDF considers its support base
more as contributors than members, and makes few attempts to mobilize the
members themselves. This stands in stark contrast to a group like the
Sierra Club, which relies heavily on extensive linkages between the
leadership and members to determine policy direction--a policy which, in
recent years, has caused serious rifts within the group, threatening to
tear it apart. These very different conceptions of the public interest
organization's role, and its associated relationship to its members, seem
to require different strategies for balancing organizational needs with
effective representation. Yet Shaiko only makes a one-size-fits-all
recommendation, suggesting that all organizations can only be effective
politically by deliberately "acting with" their members via improved
connections between leaders and members.
Shaiko's identification of "grassroots lobbying and coalition building" as
the primary strategies for influencing policy outcomes (p. 3) without
addressing any other methods of organizational participation in the
policy-making process is also problematic. In making this recommendation,
he overlooks the increasing emphasis among many of these groups on the
executive and judicial branches in the past few decades. By focusing so
exclusively on the environmental groups' interactions with congressional
decision-makers, Shaiko leaves out the tremendous role many organizations
have taken on as watchdogs, drawing media attention to environmental
problems or threatening lawsuits to enforce their solutions, and as
scientific experts, providing formal commentary on agency plans and
programs. These direct forms of policy influence often have little to do
with members, and rather rely on the professional abilities of the staff.
Because of the need to appear scientifically objective and neutral, these
organizational goals can even run counter to the role of advocacy based in
public opinion, and so would again suggest the need for different
strategies for organizational maintenance, depending on which form of
influence the organization prefers.
Shaiko clearly points out that many national environmental groups have
developed a credibility problem in recent years, particularly as they rely
more and more on corporate donations to meet their budgetary needs. There
is also the irony that they actually increase their memberships when things
are going poorly for the environment, especially when an "identifiable
enemy" like Reagan or former Interior Secretary James Watt is in power. Yet
the evidence presented here seems to suggest a trend among at least some,
if not the majority, of national environmental organizations, in which an
advisory role is taken on, giving a national voice to environmental
concerns, while leaving the actual mobilization of the masses to organizers
at the grassroots level. Perhaps the answer is to acknowledge this new
role, as working in conjunction with smaller grassroots advocates rather
than in competition with them; the larger national organizations would thus
be institutionally better suited for representing the long-term public
interest in environmental issues, rather than the of-the-minute political
desires of local activists.
This book does an excellent job of identifying areas of concern for public
interest groups, and anyone interested in the recent evolution of the
environmental movement would benefit from reading it. It does not, however,
take the essential next step of digging more deeply into how the national
scope and professionalized approach of these groups can best be optimized
as an advantage, rather than a liability, in achieving effective policy
influence.
Note
[1]. The "principle-agent" problem asks, do legislators simply act
according to the expressed preferences of the voters in their districts, or
do they deviate from those wishes? See James B. Kau and Paul H. Rubin,
"Ideology, Voting, and Shirking," 76 Public Choice 151 (1993), for a more
extensive discussion and suggested readings.
Copyright � 2000, H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for
non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the
list. For other permission questions, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------- End of forwarded message -------
************************************
Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker, Senior Lecturer
Environmental Management & Design Division
Lincoln University, Canterbury
PO Box 84
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax: 64-03-325-3841
************************************
