Environmental Leadership Programs: Toward an Initial Assessment

Over the past decade, the U.S. EPA and states have developed Environmental Leadership Programs (ELPs) to recognize and encourage facilities with strong environmental performance. ELPs offer benefits, including recognition and limited regulatory flexibility, to facilities that demonstrate that they comply with environmental regulations, set environmental performance goals that go beyond compliance, and report to agencies about their progress in meeting those goals. This article provides a descriptive account of the 18 most longstanding ELPs. We find that in addition to improving environmental quality, agencies seek to use these programs to achieve social goals such as reducing costs, improving relationships, and changing culture at facilities and agencies. Agencies collect significant amounts of information from participants about their activities under the auspices of these programs, but generally this information is not useful for program evaluation purposes. Data typically lack aggregational and inferential value: they do not share critical features that would allow them to be added up across all members and used in empirical analysis to assess program efficacy. Data weaknesses are significant, if not even surprising, given the aspirations for ELPs to facilitate policy learning and the claims that ELPs are delivering important benefits. This article charts the course for the kind of data collection and analysis that will needed to understand whether ELPs contribute to the goals agencies have set for them.