Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Environmental performance has been drawing more attention at many levels of governance. Internationally, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) provides a biannual comparison of countries on the basis of 25 indicators of environmental performance and quality. Locally, several assessments of the environmental performance of cities now exist, both within the United States and globally. The weak link in the chain of performance assessments and comparisons is the American states. At the state level, few reasonably recent, accessible, and adequate comparisons of environmental performance and policy exist. The Pilot State Eco-Efficiency Index sets out categories, indicators, and sources for filling that gap. In so doing, it provides valuable information for researchers and state governments to delve into what determines performance and how governments can be more effective and ecologically efficient.

This paper presents the pilot state eco-efficiency index, which consists of nine indicators of environmental performance and conditions, all normalized by state GDP to allow better comparison between states. Measuring a state’s performance on environmental indicators and normalizing that performance by state GDP allows us to determine the efficiency with which that state is performing; hence, ‘ecological efficiency’—or ‘eco-efficiency’ for short. This paper provides a review and critique of existing state indicators and discusses the framework and logic of the pilot index, describing each of the nine indicators, their sources of data, and their strengths and limitations. The index produces a ranking of the states, as well as radar charts mapping each state’s strengths and weaknesses.

An eco-efficiency index is valuable for several reasons. The most central is that the economy-environmental relationship is the core tension in policy debates, especially in the United States. The standard objection to climate mitigation policies, better air and water quality, habitat (such as wetlands) protection, and other results is that they undermine economic growth and vitality. An eco-efficiency index confronts the economy-environment issue directly: what environmental impact does it take to produce a given unit of income? For policy makers, the index provides a means of benchmarking their jurisdiction’s performance and policies with others, both generally and on specific indicators. For communities and citizens, they help to draw attention to strong and weak areas of performance and place pressure on policy makers to evaluate and improve environmental performance and outcomes. This index also has considerable value for researchers by defining a set of dependent variables for empirical and case studies. It is simply not feasible to explain policy success and failure without some set of performance or policy indicators. Through all of the above, the pilot eco-efficiency index is positioned to provide research that can help make government more effective.