ABSTRACT
The publication of Making Bureaucracies Think (Taylor 1984) marks a major turning point in the scholarship on environmental impact assessment (EIA). Apart from the early work of Anderson (1973), Andrews (1976), and Liroff (1976), Lynton Caldwell has been almost alone for a decade in arguing persistently that the environmental impact statement process created by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 makes a significant difference in federal agency decision making. As Caldwell is well aware, his arguments are bound to be suspect because he was a principal architect of NEPA. The ambitious, collaborative research programme on the impact of impact assessment, previewed in Caldwell (1982) and subsequently completed with support from the National Science Foundation (Caldwell et al. 1982), was an impressive empirical demonstration of NEPA's influence. Now there is Taylor who, despite a studied and not altogether charitable indifference to Cald-well's contributions, provides independent confirmation of the essential facts.
