Drawing on the careers of senior executives of the US Environmental Protection Agency, True Green identifies the concrete actions that work in protecting our nation's environment. By examining the exquisitely difficult tasks of executive leadership in environmental protection, one of the most conflicted public issues of today, these scholars provide lessons of executive effectiveness in the principal government institution essential to national environmental progress. The EPA shoulders great expectations from the public and political leaders on fulfilling its statutorily assigned activities....

The nation's approach to managing environmental policy and protecting natural resources has shifted from the national government's top down, command and control, regulatory approach, used almost exclusively in the 1970s, to collaborative, multi-sector approaches used in recent decades to manage problems that are generally too complex, too expensive, and too politically divisive for one agency to manage or resolve on its own. Governments have organized multi-sector collaborations as a way to achieve better results for the past two decades. We know much about why collaboration occurs. We know a...