The literature on environmental impact assessments (EIA) tends to focus on national case studies, while neglecting subnational EIA systems. Federalist countries represent 40 % of the world’s population and by their design link national and subnational governments in institutional arrangements that delineate or share power across administrative and sectorial areas. Therefore, the study of institutional arrangements’ influence on the conduct of environmental policy such as EIA is important in evaluating its effectiveness. This research aims to contribute to this area by examining the national and subnational EIA systems in two federalist countries, Paraná, Brazil and California, United States (US). This involved a literature review of the scientific and grey literature as well as legislation and regulations of each case study. This analysis was organized along operational, legislative, administrative, and procedural characteristics building upon existing methods from the EIA literature. The results show each federal country presents different approaches to EIA policy. Brazil represents a more centralized top-down approach based on a licensing system, which offers broader coverage of projects and in theory more standardized implementation. In the case of Paraná, there has been a recent shift towards decentralizing the EIA process for smaller projects to municipalities, although there remain institutional and technical challenges. The US EIA system covers only public projects and therefore is considerably limited in its coverage. California presents the most institutionally and technically competent EIA system of those compared in this study. However, it still suffers from problems of inconsistent implementation and litigation abuse. All case studies are facing increasing political pressures to streamline their processes, often with the proposal of arbitrary timelines.

有关环境影响评估（EIA）的文献倾向于将重点放在国家案例研究上，而忽略了国家以下的EIA系统。联邦制国家占世界人口的40％，其设计目的是在描述或共享行政和部门领域权力的体制安排中，将国家和地方以下各级政府联系起来。因此，研究机构安排对环境影响评估等环境政策行为的影响对于评估其有效性非常重要。这项研究旨在通过检查巴西巴拉那州和美国加利福尼亚州这两个联邦制国家的国家和地区以下环境影响评估系统，为这一领域做出贡献。这涉及对科学和灰色文献以及每个案例研究的法律法规的文献综述。此分析是根据EIA文献中的现有方法，根据运营，立法，行政和程序特征进行组织的。结果表明，每个联邦国家对EIA政策提出了不同的方法。巴西代表了基于许可系统的更集中的自上而下的方法，该方法提供了更广泛的项目范围，并且在理论上实现了更标准化的实施。就巴拉那州而言，尽管仍存在体制和技术挑战，但最近已开始将较小项目的环境影响评估程序下放到市政当局。美国EIA系统仅涵盖公共项目，因此覆盖范围受到很大限制。在本研究中，加利福尼亚州提供了在机构和技术上最有能力的EIA系统。然而，它仍然遭受执行不一致和诉讼滥用的问题。所有案例研究都面临着越来越大的政治压力，通常是通过提出任意时间表来简化其流程。