The Creation and Extent of America’s First Environmental Agencies

Why do administrative agencies form and expand or shrink? We study America’s oldest environmental bureaucracies—US state wildlife agencies—from their inception during America’s age of wildlife extermination to their manifestation as modern administrative agencies to gain insight. We develop a framework in which demand for agencies depends positively on the costs private landowners would incur to coordinate and self-regulate against overharvest and on the state’s capacity to administer regulations. We test implications by examining the timing of state agency creation from 1870 through 1920, changes in the size of agency budgets since the mid-twentieth century, and the proportion of modern budgets spent on nongame species for which private control is least profitable. Estimates show that high levels of state capacity and private contracting costs, caused by small landholdings and weak rights against trespass, are associated with earlier and larger agencies with less focus on nongame.