Making Measurement Matter: The Challenge and Promise of Building a Performance-Focused Environmental Protection System

Governments across the country and around the world are rapidly moving to adopt performance-focused approaches to management and decision-making. Entire national governments, including the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, have adopted laws requiring agencies to adopt performance measurement and management as a way to strengthen performance and accountability, inform public decision-making, and reinvigorate citizen confidence in government. State and local governments in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere have been experimenting individually and collectively for over a decade on the best ways to use performance measurement to improve management and governance. Environmental protection is one area where interest in strengthening the emphasis on performance information has been especially high. Numerous experiments are currently underway to explore the best ways to realize the potential of a performance-focused environmental protection system. A few, such as the ambient air quality standards of the Clean Air Act, are relatively mature. Many others are more recent. In 1995, for example, President Clinton announced Project XL, which offers regulated entities increased flexibility in return for improved environmental performance. Two months later leaders of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental agencies launched the National Environmental Performance Partnership System (NEPPS). NEPPS replaces a process-focused framework that prescribed allowable state activities funded with federal dollars with a performance-focused framework. This system is designed to encourage attention to the highest priority environmental issues and to invite collaboration between each state and EPA in addressing those priorities. Heightened interest in environmental performance measurement is occurring not only in the U.S. but abroad and not only in government but also in business. The Dutch government, for example, recently established performance reporting requirements for certain companies, and many businesses are working collaboratively through projects such as the Global Reporting Initiative to develop a common set of business environmental performance metrics.

About the Author :
Shelley Metzenbaum is Visiting Professor and Senior Fellow, University of Maryland School of Public Affairs.