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Conserving Data in the Conservation Reserve: How A Regulatory Program Runs on Imperfect Information 1st Edition

by James Hamilton (Author)

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Enrolling over 30 million acres, the U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the largest conservation program in the United States. Under the guidelines of the CRP, the federal government pays farmers to stop farming their land in the hopes of achieving a variety of conservation goals, including the reduction of soil erosion, improvement of water quality, and creation of wildlife habitat. In Conserving Data, James T. Hamilton explores the role of information in the policy cycle as it relates to the CRP. The author asks how the creation and distribution of information about what is going on across these millions of enrolled acres has influenced the development of the program itself. Of the many CRP stakeholders, each accesses a different set of information about the CRP‘s operations. Regulators have developed the Environmental Benefits Index as a rough indicator of a fields conservation benefits and adopted that measure as a way to determine which lands should be granted conservation contracts. NGOs have used publicly available data from these contracts to show how CRP monies are allocated. Members of Congress have used oversight hearings and GAO reports to monitor the Farm Service Agency‘s conservation policy decisions. Reporters have localized the impact of the CRP by writing stories about increases in wildlife and hunting on CRP fields in their areas. Conserving Data brings together and analyzes these various streams of information, drawing upon original interviews with regulators, new data from Freedom of Information Act requests, and regulatory filings. Using the CRP as a launch point, Hamilton explores the role of information, including 'hidden information,' in the design and implementation of regulatory policy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'A beautifully written study of an important program that has not received sufficient academic attention. The Conservation Reserve Program has become an enormously important force for preventing non-point source pollution, providing wildlife habitat, and even reducing emissions of greenhouse gases...Conserving Data does a superb job of explaining the political and economic forces that have shaped the evolutionary path of the CRP.'
Robert V. Percival, Director, Environmental Law Program, University of Maryland School of Law

'Those working at the interface between science and policy will find it of interest, not least because with a light touch the story is informed by a small amount of political theory explained in the introduction.'
John Hopkins, Bulletin of the British Ecological Society

About the Author

James T. Hamilton is the Charles S. Sydnor Professor of Public Policy, at the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University and Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. His prior books include Regulation Through Revelation: The Origin, Politics, and Impacts of the Toxics Release Inventory Program and All the News That‘s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1933115815
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (February 26, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 168 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781933115818
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1933115818
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 0.6 x 9.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,711,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #324 in Public Affairs
- #589 in Agriculture
- #606 in Environmental & Natural Resources Law (Books)

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James T. Hamilton

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Your information life is more abundant than ever in your role as a consumer, worker, or audience member. But as a voter, you often lack the knowledge necessary to hold institutions accountable. The decline of public affairs reporting and investigative work in the US means that, especially at the local level, there are many stories that go undiscovered and untold that are hard for media companies to monetize but would easily pass a social cost benefit test.

The central question I work on is how to sustain the accountability function of journalism, in an era of diminishing financial resources. I believe that the nascent field of computational journalism will play a part in answering this question. Through my teaching, research, and work as Director of the Stanford Journalism Program, I hope to help surface the problems faced by journalists to those looking to use computational methods to solve puzzles that will benefit society.

Interested? Follow the work of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab at http://cjlab.stanford.edu/