Jennifer A. Kagan

This research analyzes how organizations and agencies use the federal judiciary to prevent environmental degradation and address the climate crisis. Despite the central role of law in public administration, few studies have incorporated litigation and judicial advocacy to develop a more holistic picture of intersectoral relations and the provision of public services such as environmental protection. Using a co-production lens and drawing on Young's supplementary, complementary, or adversarial framework, this study asks the following research questions: What is the nature of the relationship between the three sectors as they use the federal judiciary for environmental protection? And, what do different patterns of co-production tell us about environmental protection in the US? To answer these questions, this research draws on an original dataset of federal district court cases developed from the Federal Judicial Center's Integrated Database (FJC IDB) and Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER). After looking at broad trends in environmental cases over the past 30 years, we examine a sample of cases from 2015 and 2018 to identify patterns in parties, causes of action, case locations, and outcomes. We find support primarily for supplemental and adversarial relationships and highlight the ways in which these relationships may contribute to environmental justice issues.

This article reviews the literature on third‐sector organizations (TSOs) and the environment in four key field specific journals. It aims to advance nonprofit management scholarship and practice focused on organizations as key actors in responding to the environmental crisis. Using open systems theory as a heuristic, we organize our findings into inputs, throughputs, and outcomes, and include a section on transitioning political and third‐sector contexts. We find that the literature addresses certain organizational inputs, throughputs, outcomes, and contexts consistent with the nonprofit literature generally but addresses the environmental crisis in limited ways and lacks a coordinated agenda that links these topics to provide a picture of how TSOs might effectively respond to the environmental crisis. We conclude by charting a course for future research flanked by three priorities: (1) foregrounding the role of TSOs in the environmental crisis, (2) increasing attention to the most critical environmental issues, and 3) modeling linkages across inputs, throughputs, and outcomes in addressing the environmental crisis.

The existential threat of climate change requires reimagining foundational aspects of society, including jobs, transportation, energy, the built environment, natural resources, health, and water and food supplies. We argue that to realize such broad scale change requires systems thinking. In this introduction to the special issue on Nonprofits and Climate Policy, we outline four systems-based views of global social change, organized by source of change and assumptions about the technical rationality of the system: engineering, evolutionary, social constructivist, and (critical) realist. By elaborating this framework, we shed light on the fundamental assumptions embedded in climate advocacy and policymaking. Along with describing key scholarship and practice-based examples for each approach, we align the articles in this special issue with the four views of global social change to inspire systems-based research and practice at the nonprofit and climate policy intersection. We hope that creating more explicit accounts of the key beliefs and expectations about how social change occurs at a global systemic level will help to advance research and practice in sustainability.

This study explores the concept of representation from the perspectives of environmental nonprofits. While nonprofits often serve as intermediaries between the public and government, the mechanisms through which they understand and advocate for the needs of their constituents remain underexplored, particularly in the environmental policy field where justice issues often arise. This article organizes the representation literature around three dimensions or key questions: How do organizations define their constituents? How do organizations connect with constituents? And, what authority do constituent preferences carry? Answers to these questions are derived from interviews with 22 environmental nonprofits engaged in state-level energy policy in three US states: Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Results demonstrate the utility of the three dimensions in describing the range of responses relevant to the subject organizations, along with key themes and trends among this subgroup of environmental nonprofits.

This article explores the advocacy tactics that nonprofit organizations use to influence environmental policy across five venues: legislatures, regulatory agencies, courts, ballot boxes, and governors' offices. The literature on nonprofit advocacy has grown in recent years, with studies highlighting nonprofits' use of inside and outside tactics, but studies do not consistently link tactics to venues. This article addresses this gap by exploring advocacy tactics within specific venues. Bringing venues to the forefront leads to new insights about nonprofit advocacy, along with why advocates choose certain venues and tactics. Data are based on semi‐structured interviews with 24 environmental nonprofits across three states: Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Results illuminate dynamics of nonprofit advocacy including the prevalence of nonprofit reliance on inside and hybrid tactics, insights regarding layers of outside tactics, the roles and implications of advocacy in courts and ballot measures, and nonprofits' infrequent use of venue shifting strategies.

This article analyses the preferred advocacy strategies of industry representatives and environmentalists in the conflict over oil and gas drilling in the state of Colorado. Environmental policy, social movement and nonprofit literatures describe the advocacy strategies of those seeking to influence policy. While early work assumed that actors with greater resources rely on inside tactics and those with fewer resources rely on outside tactics, more recent studies suggest that policy actors use an array of tactics. To build on recent research and improve our understanding of strategic decisions, this study examines the role that venues play in policy actors’ perceptions of the effectiveness of their advocacy tactics. Specifically, this research compares self-reported strategy effectiveness among members of the oil and gas industry with representatives of environmental groups, and asks whether effectiveness is moderated by perceptions of venue viability. Data derive from two waves of surveys of oil and gas policy actors in Colorado. Results hold implications for stakeholder engagement and suggest that venue perception is relevant to strategy effectiveness, but only within regulatory venues. In this way, the article makes a clear contribution to the interest group literature as well as the environmental policy subsystem literature.

This article presents a summary review of the voluntary sector literature on third sector organizations (TSOs) and climate change. As governments around the world fail to respond adequately to the climate crisis, TSOs are called upon to work with governments, advocate for policy change, and support communities. However, the literature on TSOs and climate change remains limited. We reviewed 68 articles about TSOs and climate change and identified four mechanisms for voluntary action on climate change, which vary on two dimensions—focusing on advocacy or implementation and occurring within or outside government—and include policy advocacy, advocacy for behavior change, participation in governance, and direct interventions. We conclude with five key areas for future research: explaining the relationship between advocacy strategies and context, foregrounding the role of TSOs in climate governance, exploring direct interventions by TSOs, examining community-based TSOs, and linking TSO action and climate outcomes.

The way in which public policies are composed may lead to conflicts that manifest in an extended policymaking duration. This paper explores the associations between policy composition and the relative duration for policies to be adopted in 15 U.S. state legislatures. We treat policy passage duration as an indicator of policy conflicts in the legislative process. We adapt the institutional grammar tool (IGT) to examine how 168 oil and gas development policies are composed and gauge the association between the content of these policies and the speed of their adoption. We find policies that are more stringent, contain more constitutive rules, target issues related to oil and gas operations or tax and finance take relatively longer to pass. These findings offer theoretical insights into the relationships between policy composition and policy adoption duration. They also provide methodological insights on measuring policy design components using a semi‐automated application of the IGT.