Environmental policy in the United States has always characterized by high levels of political conflict. At the same time, however, policy makers have shown a capacity to learn from their own and other`s experience. This article examines U.S. environmental policy since 1970 as a learning process and, more specifically, as an effort to develop three kinds of capacities for policy learning. The first decade and a half may be seen in terms of technincal learning, characterized by a high degree of technical learning led to a secach for new goals, strategies, and policy instruments, in what a new set of capacities at social learning, refecting trends in European environmental policy, international interest in the concept of sustainability , and dissatisfaction with the U.S. experience. Social learning stress communication and interaction among actors. Most industrial nations, including the United States, are working to develop and integrate capacities for all three kinds of learning. Efforts to integrate capacities for conceptual and social learnig in the United States have had mixed sucess, however, because the institutional and legal framework for environmental policy still is founded on technical learning

Public administration review PAR

May/June 2001 Volume 61 Number 3