DOI: 10.25338/b80k9r
title: Plain-text conversions of U.S. Final Environmental Impact Statements from 2013-2020

description: Administrative procedures are intended to increase transparency and help
 agencies make better decisions. However, these requirements also increase
 agency workload. Understanding how public agencies satisfy procedural
 requirements is a critical facet of agency performance. This analysis
 focuses on the language agencies use in Environmental Impact Statements
 (EISs) required by the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) –
 specifically, the reuse of similar text within and between assessments. We
 synthesize theories of institutional isomorphism and bureaucratic coping
 to understand why and how text is reused, and consider the tradeoffs
 associated with this behavior. Using a national dataset of 1014 EISs
 published by 22 U.S. agencies from 2013 to 2020, we explore how
 boilerplate language varies by agency, authors, project type, location,
 and consulting firm involvement. We find that text reuse primarily occurs
 where there is a clear substantive rationale for boilerplate language or
 where studies share authors or contract consulting firms. This indicates:
 (1) that agencies largely do not merely engage in pro forma
 compliance efforts; and (2) that while NEPA procedures are oriented around
 individual projects and decisions, cross-project learning and the
 narrowness – or breadth – of agencies’ project
 portfolios shape analytical routines and the relative tradeoffs of
 boilerplate text in policy analysis. This paper adds to our theoretical
 understanding of agencies’ coping strategies in response to institutional
 pressures and makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating the
 application of text reuse measurement and information extraction methods
 in public administration research.
description: These data are full-text representations of EIS documents and
 associated metadata stored in the US EPA’s e-NEPA repository. The e-NEPA
 page provides a nearly comprehensive record of final EISs (FEISs) FEISs
 published since October 2012, although a small proportion of files are not
 posted, and some file links are corrupted or broken. We used web-scraping
 to record available metadata and download available documents. These raw
 data include all FEISs obtained from the e-NEPA page. The subsequent
 analysis concers a subsample of FEISs published between 2013 and 2020 for
 agencies that completed at least 5 EISs during that time. We exclude
 Adopted FEISs, which are cases where one agency uses an EIS already
 prepared by another agency in lieu of a separate analysis, as well as
 Withdrawn FEISs. There are also several cases where two agencies (often
 the Bureau of Land Management [BLM] and FS) file EISs referring to the
 same project, using almost identical documentation. In these cases, we
 keep the EIS published first. After download, the
 documents were converted to plain text using the pdftools pckage in
 R https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/pdftools/ and stored in
 data.table format (https://rdatatable.gitlab.io/data.table/) by page.
 Finally, the aggregated text is stored as an .RDS file for compression
 (the equivalent csv is ~10GB).
description: *All code used to obtain these data and used to generate the
 analyses and results shown in the associated publication are available at
 https://github.com/tylerascott/tuolumne/tree/master/boilerplate_project *An earlier version of this data set included a text corpus that contained both DEIS and FEIS records. Since only FEISs are analyzed in the paper--and thus necessary to replicate the work--we have replaced the original file with an FEIS-only file that is half the file size and thus much easier to download and manipulate.