GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

24THE POLITICS OF AIR POLLUTIONinterest groups are incorporated and group members are provided “side-payments”in order to pacify them. This allows economic elites’ growth agendato proceed more or less unabated. Clarence Stone (1989) explains howAfrican Americans were incorporated into Atlanta’s regime coalition duringthe Civil Rights Era in order to maintain a positive business climate. In hisanalysis of San Francisco politics from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s,DeLeon (1992) describes one of the few examples of successful public mobilizationefforts to obstruct local economic growth. This broad based antigrowthmovement, allied with specific political leaders, however, collapsed inthe 1990s with the mayorship of Diane Feinstein.SYMBOLIC INCLUSIONThe governing and regime coalition approaches offer two different means tointerpret the ecological modernization efforts that were initiated on the locallevel, and then adopted by state governments, as well as by the federal government—asin the case of the Clean Air Act of 1990 (Gonzalez 2001a,chap. 6). Thus, public policies designed to force the development and implementationof air pollution control technologies could have been the result ofpublic officials incorporating environmental and public health advocates inresponse to voter mobilization efforts around clean air issues. Alternatively,such advocates could have been incorporated, and ecological modernizationpolicies could have been subsequently initiated, because segments of the publicthreatened to be politically and economically disruptive if their air pollutionconcerns were not addressed.A third possible motivation underlying the incorporation of the leadersof public interest groups is to provide a democratic facade to the policymakingprocess. This incorporation would therefore be largely symbolic. Theimplication here is that the incorporation of public interest group leaders intothe policymaking process has little or no substantive impact on policy outcomes.Instead, this incorporation occurs to communicate to the broaderpublic that the public policy formulation process is reflective of various perspectives—therebyenhancing the legitimacy of said policies (Edelman 1977;Wynne 1982; Saward 1992).Mark Dowie (1995), in his critique of large “mainstream” U.S. environmentalgroups, alleges that these groups have been knowingly incorporatedon a symbolic basis. He specifically holds that the leaders of the major environmentalgroups prioritize organizational maintenance over achieving policygoals. Toward this end, environmental groups’ leaders find it more importantto be incorporated, or “close to power,” than to “fight” for political goals,particularly since the former is a better fund-raising strategy.The conclusions of Ronald Shaiko’s (1999) study of five leading environmentalgroups is consistent with Dowie’s argument that environmental