The Ecology of Power: U.S. Environmental State Capacity, 1973-2021

Christopher Rea, Brown University
Scott Frickel, Brown University

What shapes the power and the resources needed for the environmental state to provide environmental welfare? Drawing from political, organizational, and environmental sociology, we sketch an ecological theory of political control to explain cross-unit and over-time variance in environmental state capacity. The theory is ecological in two senses: the political and organizational “ecology” that units of the state embed within modulate the politics that shape their resources and thus capacity; and the various and distinctive politics of nature and ecology, as such, structure those dynamics, too. We assess our account using original administrative data spanning 239 governmental units over nearly 50 years, from 1973 to 2021, allowing us to simultaneously situate the environmental state in the full federal bureaucracy, and also to disaggregate the environmental state into its constituent elements to show how distinctive organizational characteristics shape unit-specific shifts in capacity. Our findings hold broad relevance for students of state power and governance, and especially environmental statecraft, revealing how hidden developmentalism and the politics of nature differently shape state capacity within diverse units of the environmental state, and offering a more general template for disaggregating states and theorizing the political-ecological origins of their dynamism and internal heterogeneity.

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 Presented in Session 134. Comparative-Historical Environmental Sociology Part Two: Modernity and its Others