In 1959, in one of the most cited works in political science, Charles Lindblom upended the synoptic model of decision making through a careful critique of the herculean and ultimately unproductive task that would be required to actually carry it out (see Charles Lindblom, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” Public Administration Review 19 [Spring 1959]: 79–88). Instead, Lindblom introduced the idea of “incremental” decision making and argued that this “satisficing” approach—not merely the poor stepchild of synoptic decision making—actually has merit in solving collective action problems in a society. According to Lindblom, a review of the consequences of a prior policy decision can shed light on that decision's merits and flaws and lead to a new round of policymaking. For Lindblom, getting policy right in any given round of policymaking is less important than the ability to learn over time. Equally important is the ability of stakeholders to bring to light new information that decision makers might otherwise overlook in debating the merits and demerits of a potential policy change. Here, democracy, rather than being the enemy of rational decision making, is a practical and useful remedy for bounded rationality. In Knowledge and Environmental Policy, William Ascher, Toddi Steelman, and Robert Healy present us with a detailed analysis of environmental policymaking that demonstrates in longhand much of what Lindblom presented fifty years ago.

Without adopting any particular theoretical framework for studying the role of knowledge in environmental policymaking, they embark on an analysis of the myriad ways in which the generation, transmission, and use of knowledge will each fall short in meeting one of several criteria they list for evaluating the role of knowledge in environmental policy debates: comprehensiveness, dependability, selectivity, timeliness, relevance, openness, efficiency, and creativity. The authors point to multiple factors that make it unlikely that their criteria will be met—things like complexity, uncertainty, institutional biases, filtering of information, constraints posed by environmental policies themselves, privileging of certain types of information over others, etc. They offer illustrations throughout the text but also treat three specific cases: (1) water management in the Klamath River basin, (2) the controversy over the use of Bisphenol A in plastics, and (3) efforts to strengthen regulations for concentrated animal-feeding operations. For each of these, they discuss the specific ways in which the generation, transmission, and use of knowledge have fallen short.

Though they are systematic in reviewing each case with respect to the criteria they provide, they are not as thorough in examining the forces that produce the negative outcomes they uncover. For example, they critique the role of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the Klamath case for limiting the focus of decision making to the rights of the endangered fish, but do not examine why the ESA might be written to guard against any effort to water down its protections. Terry Moe's analysis of the politics of structural choice would have presented an added dimension to this analysis in that his argument suggests that this is not simply a matter of revising the ESA (see Terry Moe, “The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure,” in John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson, eds., Can the Government Govern?, 1989, pp. 267–329). In fact, there are reasons to expect that environmental legislation will be written with the intent of limiting flexible interpretation. This is especially true if one considers the atypical electoral politics that delivered such a progressive class to Congress in the 1970s when most of the major statutes that shape environmental policy were passed.

In their final chapter, they provide a number of suggestions that might improve, at least at the margins, the generation, transmission, and use of knowledge. Many of their recommendations fall under the heading of “increasing democracy” in environmental decision making. For example, they argue for the inclusion of local knowledge and public preferences in decision making so that expert knowledge, faulty and partial as it is, no longer has singular status as the appropriate knowledge base for environmental policy. They argue for increased participation in environmental policymaking through mechanisms like consensus conferences, joint fact finding, and science shops. In addition, they call for more transparency in the ways that knowledge is produced (e.g., scientists should clarify how they came to their conclusions) and in the way it is applied in government (e.g., making government more open and giving the public better access to federal science). One thing that is not clear from their recommendations is how much will change if these recommendations are followed. Many of their suggestions draw on approaches that, though they may not be mainstream, are part of current practice. Thus the question of how broken the current system is becomes somewhat muddied.

In general, the book seems targeted mostly at a practitioner audience who is more interested in a menu of potential remedies for problems in environmental policymaking than in academic assessment of how well suited our political system is to finding, sorting, and applying credible information to policy formation. The book tends to be cursory in its treatment of relevant academic work and overlooks a number of approaches that might have led to a more balanced assessment of environmental policymaking. For example, the authors do not address Kevin Esterling's account of the political economy of expertise that puts pressure on interest groups to provide members of Congress with reliable information (see Kevin Esterling, The Political Economy of Expertise: Information and Efficiency in American National Politics, 2004). Nor do they engage with the extensive literature on issue networks that explains how issue networks can act as a testing ground for new ideas, thus taking some of the burden of knowledge assessment off the shoulders of generalist policymakers.

Not only do the authors overlook mechanisms in the political system that might support some of the criteria they care about, but they also are somewhat one-sided in their treatment of their case material. For instance, in pointing out an increasing diversity of sources of knowledge available for environmental policymaking, Ascher, Steelman, and Healy call attention to the complexity and uncertainty that this adds for policymakers. Though they imply that we are worse off for this diversity, they never explicitly compare this new state of affairs with the past. In fact, diversity might be useful in that it can provide a mechanism through which policymakers can tease out biases in any single source of information. Similarly, in describing the difficulties of setting water policy in the Klamath Basin, the authors describe how stakeholders remedied the reductive approach enshrined in the Endangered Species Act by creating a stakeholder decision-making group that brought a broader set of concerns to the decision process. Though Ascher, Steelman, and Healy are critical of the role of the ESA in shaping early decision making in Klamath, the case could also be read as an example of the flexibility of our political system that allows decision makers and stakeholders to adapt decision-making procedures to suit the particular problem at hand. The tendency to draw out of the analysis only negative examples creates an image of a policymaking system that is, perhaps, more hamstrung than is actually the case.

While most scholars of environmental policy will agree with the authors' overall argument—that there are problems with the application of knowledge in environmental policymaking that might be improved through an increase in democratic access to decision making—it is not clear that this book sheds new light on environmental policymaking. To the extent that the book aims to reach a practitioner rather than an academic audience, this may not be a shortcoming in that practitioners are more interested in practical implications and concrete remedies than academic debates. A strength of the book, then, is its ability to cover a breadth of analytic territory that might not be possible if they were more painstaking in their treatment of the important academic literature that precedes them.