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2020 Utah L. Rev. 795 (2020)
Assessing the Performance of Voluntary Environmental Programs

handle is hein.journals/utahlr2020 and id is 825 raw text is: ASSESSING THE PERFORMANCE OF VOLUNTARY ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMS Luis Inaraja Vera* Abstract In recent years, government agencies have increasingly relied on voluntary programs to achieve a variety of goals, fiom improving worker safety to creating healthier living conditions in urban areas. This type of government initiative is based on a bargain between the agency and private citizens; the government provides certain incentives-economic or otherwise-and private actors voluntarily adopt behaviors that benefit the public. One example is cleaning up a contaminated site and building an affordable housing project. While agencies have made substantial progress since the creation of the first voluntary programs, much work remains. To move forward in this area, and especially with voluntary environmental programs, two critical questions must be answered: First, how should we evaluate the performance of voluntary environmental programs? And second, how do we determine the appropriate level of government-federal, state, or local-that should be in charge of implementing them? These two questions have not been satisfactorily addressed to date. This Article addresses these lingering questions by evaluating the performance of a sophisticated local voluntary cleanup program. The resulting analysis uncovers some of the shortcomings in how agencies and scholars have previously assessed voluntary programs, yielding four contributions to the literature. First, the Article offers a deeper understanding of how data can and should affect the design and improvement of regulatory programs. Second, the examination of a local voluntary cleanup program provides much-needed empirical support for * © 2020 Luis Inaraja Vera. Assistant Professor (starting Fall 2020), Gonzaga University School of Law; Conservation Law Fellow, Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute; Adjunct and Visiting Scholar, Indiana University Maurer School of Law. For helpful conversations and comments, I would like to thank Vicki Been, Rebecca Bratspies, Dan Chorost, John Patrick Diggins, Robert Fischman, Charlene Gilbert, Bruce Huber, Christine Leas, Derek Marcus, Sharmila Murthy, Richard Revesz, Larry Schnapf, David Schwartz, Linda Shaw, Howard Slatkin, Eric Stern, David Watson, Mark Willis, Katrina Wyman, Jessica Yager, and the participants in the NYU Lawyering Scholarship Colloquium, the Furman Center Fellows Presentation Series, and Vermont Law School's Colloquium on Environmental Scholarship. I am also very grateful to Ingrid Gould Ellen, Maxwell Austensen, and Wei You for their assistance with the empirical aspects of this article. For excellent research assistance, I would like to thank Anastasia Lopatina, Julia Quigley, Olivia Schneider, and Maliheh Zare. Research for this article was supported by a generous grant from the New York Community Trust. I would also like to thank the Utah Law Review staff for their careful and thoughtful editing. 795

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