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This article advances an argument about two "imagined environments"--my term for the frameworks that human groups use to depict and dwell in more-than-human worlds. The first of these imagined environments arose around the US-Mexican Boundary Commission (1849-59): while failing to fulfill its official objective of building physical border monuments, this team of explorers and engineers still made media that helped two settler states conceptualize and control their borderlands. Against this increasingly efficient exploitation of both humans and nonhumans, a second imagined environment persisted in Mescalero Apache pictographs, Chihene Apache performances, and other Apache media. On our precarious planet, this imagined environment can teach us to stop defining ourselves around fixed places and to remain resilient while migrating through shifting spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how best to design a new agency is of immense public importance. Congress creates new agencies and reforms agency structures with some regularity, while commentators frequently call for the creation of new or redesigned agencies. Scholars have, as a result, increasingly turned to studying the diversity of agency structures and questions of agency design. In this Essay, we tackle one of the decisions that must be made in designing any new agency—the choice between a single-director agency and a multimember commission—and we make a general case against multimember commissions. For the most part, scholarly discussion of these structures is interwoven with questions of agency independence. But these two questions—singularity and independence—can be pulled apart and assessed separately. Yet surprisingly little of the existing literature focuses systematically on this decision. The central benefits of single-director agencies are that they better ensure agency efficacy at accomplishing statutory mandates, and that they offer clearer lines of responsibility and thus accountability for agency failures. Proponents of multimember commissions concede the inefficiency of its design but hold that inefficiency is desirable because it serves as a defense against liberty-infringing actions. We term this the “safeguards of liberty fallacy” and show that it rests on faulty foundations. The most often discussed benefits of multimember commissions are that they enhance deliberation and accountability. Dissents also serve as a “fire alarm” signal to Congress and the courts of potential agency malfeasance and thus enable greater accountability. We do not disagree that these are potential benefits of a multimember commission, but we believe that these benefits are wildly overvalued, and their costs are widely undervalued. In addition to suffering from baseline problems, these arguments fail to take seriously the reality of asymmetric political polarization. Finally, we turn to the relationship between multimember commissions and regulated entities. We argue that the adjudicatory origins of multimember commissions cannot carry the weight of that design choice in an era of rulemaking, and we also suggest that multimember commissions might suffer from more acute industry capture than single-director agencies. In short, the general case against multimember commissions is extremely strong. Scholars and policymakers would be well-advised to recommend singledirector agencies as a default presumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prevalence of state-level commissions convened to make policy recommendations, research to date has not systematically investigated the ways in which these bodies impact policy or degree to which state-level interest groups can use these institutions in that process. We argue that less powerful groups will favor these mechanisms and use them to get issues onto the institutional agenda and to increase the likelihood of legislative success. We also suggest that traditionally powerful groups will oppose the creation of reform-minded task forces, but will likely use them to hinder policy change once they are formed. We test this assertion in an analysis of the creation and recommendations of task forces convened to study autism insurance mandates, as well as the eventual adoption of such mandates, in the American states between 2001 and 2010. The results suggest that public and industry groups influence the formation and recommendations of task forces, but that the latter appears to have a relatively larger impact. They also suggest that a task force recommendation has a large impact on the likelihood of adopting an autism insurance mandate and that neither the insurance industry nor autism advocacy groups have a direct influence on adoption after controlling for the presence of a recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the culture of standards development of U.S. technical advisory groups (TAG). It states that the culture is grounded in cooperation and common purpose. It notes that the development process requires discipline and attentiveness. It mentions that standards are the foundation of how everyone get along and how they continue to effectively function in a complex environment.