Inside the Black Box of Environmental Bureaucracy: A Global Comparison of Public Environmental Agencies

Worldwide, public environmental agencies play central roles in formulating and implementing environmental policy. Meanwhile, vast scholarship spanning comparative politics, public administration, and other political science sub-fields has demonstrated the profound influence that institutional features of public agencies can have on their performance. Yet we know little about how these features vary across countries, let alone what explains this variation. This makes it difficult to understand the role that public agency design plays in environmental outcomes and inhibits efforts to strengthen environmental state capacity where it is weak. Synthesizing multiple secondary datasets, I document substantial variation in a range of institutional features – including measures of agency autonomy, manager characteristics, the existence of various agency functions, and citizen engagement – for 42 national environmental agencies spanning six continents. I then explore potential explanations for this variation, including characteristics of national political systems, levels of economic development, and international donor activity. Finally, I examine associations between institutional features and a range of environmental measures related to greenhouse gas emissions, local pollution, and biodiversity. Altogether, this paper contributes one of the first systematic, cross-national comparisons of public environmental agencies. In doing so, it provides a preliminary understanding of the ways in which these organizations differ, why, and to what end, laying groundwork for more detailed studies on this topic and enhancing our understanding of the role that public agency reform may play in ameliorating pressing environmental crises.