Coming Clean is new environmental policy book by Prof. Kraft

Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance is the title of a new book co-authored by political science Prof. Michael Kraft of UW-Green Bay. The book was released this month by MIT Press.

Coming Clean 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 a member of the Public and Environmental Affairs  faculty at UW-Green Bay. His co-authors are 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.

 For more information on the book, visit the MIT Press website.