ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
focus on monetary cost, CBA has found support amongst right-wing oppo-
nents of ‘excessive’ environmental regulation who believe that the wider use
of CBA would reduce the regulatory burden on industry and help inculcate
bureaucrats with a greater sensitivity to costs. Both the Reagan administra-
tion in the early 1980s and the Republican Congress in 1995 extended the
range of issues for which federal agencies were required to use CBA before
introducing any significant new regulation (Rosenbaum 1997 : 36–7). In the
UK, the Conservative government ensured that legislation setting up a new
Environment Agency required it to carry out CBA before making any sig-
nificant intervention, a requirement that environmentalists claimed would
undermine its capacity to protect the environment (Carter and Lowe 1995 :
55). With such friends, it is not surprising that many environmentalists are
suspicious of CBA.
Fourthly, there is a strong anti-democratic element inherent in all three
techniques because their administrative rationalism legitimates ‘govern-
ment by the experts’ and denies citizens the opportunity to voice their views
(Dryzek 2005 :ch. 4). By allocating a primary role to professional experts
such as economists, scientists or lawyers, these techniques privilege certain
elite stakeholders, particularly when the detailed analysis is not made pub-
lic. CBA limits conflict about a decision to those parties with something at
stake for which they are willing to pay, and who know about or are imme-
diately affected by the conflict. Indeed, CBA can be a way of preventing a
conflict from breaking into the public realm, where it might come to the
attention of democratic institutions such as legislatures, political parties,
courts and the press (Sagoff 1988 : 96–7). Proponents of CBA defend it as
democratic on the economic argument that its values are those of the pub-
lic expressed through their private choices in the market-place (Amy 1990 :
68), but Sagoff ( 1988 )argues persuasively that our choices as consumers may
be quite different from our choices as citizens. As consumers we may pre-
ferthe convenience of plastic disposable bottles, but as citizens we might
vote to ban them asecologically damaging. From the point of view of sus-
tainable development, it might be better if policymakers put their trust
in the citizen’s long-term concern to protect the environment rather than
the consumer’s short-term individual preference. By contrast, EIA has more
democratic potential because it involves a formal, public process of consul-
tation with a wide range of stakeholders including public agencies, private
organisations and groups representing environmental, consumer and citi-
zen interests. EIA provides an opportunity for environmental and citizen
groups to engage in the decision process by giving them access to informa-
tion, the right to comment on draft reports and to apply for judicial review
of the EIA preparation. In Australia, governments have used EIA as a means
of gauging public opinion on a project but also as a means of deferring
difficult decisions (Papadakis 1993 :112).
Finally, these techniques, if insensitively applied, ignore distributional
and equity considerations. Risk assessment often glosses over any unequal