ABSTRACT
Environmental sustainability is an emerging concept that promises to be of extreme importance in the coming decades. This introduction provides a short precis of the overall argument of the book. It connects the issues of trust in administrative agencies to broader issues of environmental sustainability. Policy development required the participation of environmental, economic, and political/social organizations from the region. Government organizations were not only part of this process, but often served as primary actors and as venues for discussion. The book investigates one reputational dimension of a particularly important federal agency in environmental sustainability efforts— trust in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It adopts a novel, alternative method for assessing trust in an administrative agency. The book concludes with a discussion that considers the new research frontiers that this research opens up as well as what these results suggest about the role of the EPA in efforts to build sustainable communities.
