2019 NAREA Meeting: Post-Conference Workshop on Environmental Regulation and Innovation in Local Communities

Workshop Announcement and Call for Papers:

The 2019 Northeast Agricultural and Resource Economics Association (NAREA) Post-Conference Workshop will be held June 11-12, 2019, in Portsmouth, NH

Deadline is February 18, 2019

Due to the need to remain globally competitive while espousing more sustainable production and consumption patterns, local communities are under increasing pressure to adopt innovative strategies to manage the economic and environmental impacts of environmental regulations. Further, increasingly decentralized regulatory design and enforcement can create wide disparities in economic and environmental outcomes across jurisdictions, reinforcing any anxiety and competition between states and local governments with respect to economic growth and environmental quality. Local communities can adopt productivity-enhancing and pollution reducing technologies while also developing innovative policy approaches and governance structures to manage these impacts. It is therefore imperative to understand how local communities innovate – both in the technological and policy/governance spheres, the factors that motivate them to do so, and how their innovations determine the environmental and economic outcomes they experience. Additionally, and equally vital is an understanding of how individual households and businesses in local communities help shape local environmental regulations and the channels through which they can influence the design of local regulations.

This workshop seeks to invite a conversation among researchers, think-tanks, government agencies and policymakers to enhance our understanding of how local communities innovate when shaping and responding to environmental regulations, and how these environmental regulations affect rural communities’ economic well-being and environmental quality. Keynote speakers include:

• Kathleen Segerson, University of Connecticut
• David Popp, Syracuse University

We are interested in soliciting empirical and/or theoretical papers using state-of-the-art methods to examine the impact of regulation on various metrics of innovation, environmental quality, and economic performance to assess the well-being of local communities - rural or urban - in the context of environmental regulation. We would like to invite papers that deal with a variety of innovative approaches to respond to regulation such as (but not limited to) abatement technology adoption and diffusion, environmental patenting, energy and transportation infrastructure, as well as innovative policy and governance approaches including information disclosure mechanisms, environmental management systems, social responsibility-oriented practices, government-NGO partnerships and other multi-stakeholder cooperative initiatives. We hope to see papers thinking about how regulation and innovation impact various environmental quality measures such as (but not limited to) industrial air, water, hazardous waste and other types pollution as well as issues related to land use, forest stewardship and management, and energy use. Further, papers that can related regulation and innovation to economic performance, in terms of output and productivity, production efficiency, employment, investment, property prices, capital expenditures, infrastructure spending and global competitiveness, among many others. Finally, we are interested in attracting papers that examine how to enhance public participation of citizens in local communities and those that investigate the channels through which individual households and businesses can influence public policy.

Abstract Submission Guidelines
Authors wishing to have a paper considered must submit an extended abstract by Monday, February 18, 2019, 5 pm eastern. Abstracts must be submitted online at http://www.narea.org/2019-workshop, where authors will be prompted to provide:

• name, address, e-mail address and phone number of paper presenter or primary contact;
• title of paper
• name and institutional affiliation of paper presenter and co-author(s)
• 2-4 key words
• extended abstract: 1000 to 1500 words maximum
• references cited

Electronic acknowledgements of submissions will be sent to all submitters. Abstracts will be reviewed by the NAREA Workshop Selected Papers Committee in terms of the significance to the field, strength of methodology/design, and clarity of writing. Authors will be notified of the status of their abstract by April 1, 2019.

Selected paper presentations will be 20 minutes. Full papers must be received from notified authors by May 16, 2019, to be included in the workshop's program. Papers presented at the workshop will be considered for expedited review and publication in a special 2020 issue of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review (ARER) if final versions of the papers are submitted to ARER by July 31, 2019.

Thanks to anticipated funding sources that support this workshop’s emphasis on innovation and local communities, we will be able to provide a combination of travel support and honoraria on a limited basis. In addition, all paper processing fees will be covered for papers accepted into the journal. Further information concerning workshop registration and the final program will be provided in the spring issue of the NAREA Newsletter and on the NAREA website.

For more information, please contact the NAREA Workshop Organizing Committee:

• Donna Ramirez-Harrington (Donna.Ramirez-Harrington@uvm.edu), University of Vermont
• Martin D. Heintzelman (mheintze@clarkson.edu), Clarkson University
• Shadi Attalah (shadi.atallah@unh.edu), University of New Hampshire
• Stephan J. Goetz (sgoetz@psu.edu, Penn State and NERCRD

NAREA Statement on Diversity and Inclusion: NAREA is committed to promoting a culture of inclusivity at our conferences, workshops and in our journal.