Act Locally, Affect Globally: How Changing Social Norms to Influence the Private Sector Shows a Path to Using Local Government to Improve Environmental Harms

Abstract

There has been comparatively little exploration of the importance of local government in addressing large-scale environmental harms, in spite of much activity at the local level dealing with climate change. This Article posits that local governments can affect large-scale environmental harms because they can influence the private sector through tar-geted social norm creation that cannot be accomplished easily at other levels of government. The Article notes that efforts to induce the private sector to take actions without enforcement capability have been problematic, but that connections to private sector decisionmakers and influencing of their internal norms—which can occur more easily at the local level— can create action not just locally, but wherever corporations operate.