Over the past three decades environmental objectives have emerged in the West with considerable strength and influence to reshape public attitudes. Until World War II agriculture and raw-materials extraction still dominated the region's economic and political views.' But in recent years the West has begun to change rapidly. New residents have brought with them new attitudes toward natural resources. Increasingly, those resources are thought of as an environment to enhance individual and regional standards of living rather than as material commodities alone. An indigenous environmental constitutency has become more vigorous in challenging the previously dominant extractive economy of lumber, grazing, and mining.

In the social-scientific literature on the welfare state, scholars have long argued that the quality and extent of support available to workers outside the market—the citizen's wage—has a direct impact on their standard of living and an indirect effect on the bargaining position of labor within market relationships. In a parallel way, recent feminist scholarship on social policy has pointed out that how—if at all—the state steps in to assist women in their role as mothers when marital relationships break up or never form has a direct impact on the standard of living within motheronly families, and an indirect effect on women's bargaining position within two-parent families by (at least partially) setting the terms on which they will live should they want to exit relationships. Thus, just as analysts have argued that the level of the citizen's wage is revealing about the effect of policy on class inequality, a focus on what the state does for single mothers and their children is analytically strategic for assessing the relationship between policy and gender inequality. The situation of mother-only families reveals the inherent social and economic vulnerability of all women that exists due to their childrearing and domestic responsibilities and their low earnings, which is usually masked when women are in households with wage-earning men.

The work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Atchafalaya (Uh-CHAFF-a-LIE-uh) Basin in southern Louisiana is an especially revealing example of the problems facing government agencies trying to balance conflicting economic and environmental demands. The basin contains precious wetlands and wildlife and major economic resources such as oil, gas, timber, and fish. It is also the center of one of the most hydrologically dynamic areas in the world. For the Corps, the basin serves as a vital part of the flood-control system for the entire lower Mississippi Valley. The problem was to reconcile this purpose with the continuing need for resource exploitation and increased concern for protecting the environment. In the Atchafalaya Basin, science proved its limitations and the art of politics its worth. This was a natural laboratory that taught engineers and environmentalists alike.

Since its first widespread use during World War I, the public corporation has figured prominently as an instrument of government on the federal and state level. Its policy domain has progressively expanded from wartime financing and procurement to broadly defined developmental, lending, and investment activities. Functioning outside the regular structure of the executive branch, the public corporation operates as a separate legal entity invested with independent borrowing authority and the power to retain earnings derived from its activities. The institution's proliferating presence on the political landscape reflects the continuing appeal of its hybrid form, designed to wed market efficiency to the pursuit of public purposes.

Political scientists have often referred to core decision-making groups in American politics as “policy communities” or, more popularly, as “the iron triangle.” Invariably, they are describing the interaction patterns of specialists in the executive and legislative branches of government and in the private sector who devote primary attention to the initiation and implementation of public policy in a particular issue area. In large measure the groups are depicted as having close-knit working relationships that result from frequent interaction, similarity in information sources and commonality in ideological predisposition. Perceptive observers such as Hedrick Smith, however, have pointed out that in some policy arenas there are critics who are not part of what is usually regarded as the cozy establishment network. These he has referred to as “dissident triangles” or rival networks that compete with varying degrees of success in the process.