Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Around the world, local governments are identifying ways to build resilience against a changing climate. A critical factor in this adaptation is building new infrastructure and/or restoring ecosystems to combat floods, droughts, and sea-level rise and to protect water quality. However, developing these projects requires permits to mitigate harm to people and the environment. Many projects require interrelated approvals from multiple agencies at local, state, and federal levels. The complexity of the environmental permitting process often results in longer review times, increased administrative costs, and overall delay of potential benefits to come from the project. As proposed infrastructure is increasingly innovative (and unfamiliar to permitting agencies), these costs are expected to grow. Identifying ways to streamline the environmental permitting process is important for enabling governments to create resilience-building infrastructure efficiently and effectively.

Research Approach

Having developed a forthcoming framework of factors hypothesized to affect permitting efficiency and effectiveness, this paper tests which mechanisms most strongly affect efficiency by analyzing the permitting process undertaken by water projects in California. Mechanisms include project characteristics, organizational characteristics, collaboration among permitting agencies and between agencies and applicants, and the regulatory regime. Measures of efficiency include overall time and cost. I model the relationship between the mechanisms and efficiency using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), an approach that uses Boolean algebra to identify prominent causal pathways from the data, essentially categorizing recipes of factors that lead to more or less successful permitting.

Implications for Research and Policy

Despite the ubiquity of permitting as a tool for mitigating environmental harm, the extant literature has paid little attention to how permitting occurs and whether the process is effective. This analysis provides empirical evidence of which factors are most prominent in leading to permitting costs and delays, offering critical information for regulatory agencies to redesign their permitting approach. Additionally, by testing the interaction between agency-agency and agency-applicant coordination and other characteristics, this work contributes to our understanding of when and why collaborative, networked approaches to environmental management are effective.