Kraft earns national award for book on environmental politics

Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance, a book co-authored by recently retired political science Prof. Michael Kraft of UW-Green Bay, has been awarded prestigious recognition by the American Political Science Association.

New book, Coming Clean, co-authored by Prof. Michael Kraft

Coming Clean is the 2012 recipient of the APSA’s Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize for best scholarly book in environmental politics published in the last three years. The selection was made by the APSA’s Science, Technology and Environmental Politics section. The chairperson of the selection committee, Prof. Dorothy Daley of the University of Kansas, termed it “a terrific piece of scholarship.” Kraft and his two co-authors will be honored during the APSA annual meeting Aug. 31 in New Orleans.

Kraft’s book is described by its publisher as the first text to investigate the process of information disclosure as a policy strategy for environmental protection. Requirements that firms disclose information about their environmental performance is part of an approach to environmental protection that departs from conventional command-and-control regulation. The latter approach, Kraft and his co-authors argue, sometimes leads government and industry to focus on meeting only minimal standards.

Coming Clean links information disclosure to actual improvements in corporate environmental performance by analyzing data from the federal government’s Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI. The research draws  on an original set of survey data from corporations and federal, state, and local officials, among other sources.

Kraft is an emeritus member of the Public and Environmental Affairs  faculty at UW-Green Bay. His co-authors were Mark Stephan, an associate professor in political science at Washington State University, Vancouver, and former UW-Green Bay faculty colleague Troy D. Abel, an assistant professor in the Environmental Studies Department at the Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University.

The book was released in early 2011 by MIT Press. For more information on the book, visit the MIT Press website.

Announcement of the Caldwell Prize for Kraft’s book is the second major APSA honor this year for a UW-Green Bay faculty member in the Public and Environmental Affairs academic unit. In May, Prof. Denise Scheberle was selected 2012 national teacher of the year. She, too, will be recognized at the association’s annual conference in New Orleans. For details of the Scheberle award, see https://news.uwgb.edu/index.php/log-news/releases/05/07/scheberle-national-teacher-of-the-year-1283/

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