“For more than 25 years after passage of the Coastal Zone Act, there were no formal regulations to implement it. Instead, [Delaware’s] Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) used an informal, undefined regulation system that pleased neither environmentalists nor industry representatives who disagreed frequently over the law’s implementation. Several attempts along the way to adopt formal regulations were unavailing. Strong differences existed between industry and environmentalists over the department’s efforts to interpret and apply the law to individual permit applications.” This case study tells the story of how “in a new attempt to draft regulations, DNREC officials hired [Gregory] Sobel, director of the Massachusetts-based Environmental Mediation Services, and colleagues from the Consensus Building Institute to assess whether a new effort to draft regulations would be feasible.”

This case study can be found on pp. 14-15.