Don't let a serious crisis go to waste: exploring linkages between environmental policy-making and environmental incidents

This article seeks to explore the impact of environmental incidents on state-level environmental policy-making in the US. Environmental policy researchers have identified several factors and their impact on states' ability and willingness to formulate green policies. Most studies have used binary values to measure state environmental policy formulation (sepf) variable. However, this strategy can lead to biased estimates because the extent of policy-formulation is not the same across states. We propose an ordinal approach to measure the sepf variable along with multiple correspondence analyses (MCA). We also test for the impact of environmental incidents and its interaction with the strength of environmental organisations on the formulation of green policies. Econometric results from the longitudinal data indicate that the states that witness environmental incidents in the current period are less likely to formulate environmental policies during that period. However, when environmental organisations root their advocacy programmes on previous period's environmental incident(s), it has a positive and significant impact on environmental policy-making. These results contribute not only to our understanding of critical determinants of environmental policy-making, but also indicate that environmental organisations can leverage environmental incidents to influence state-level policy-making.