Who Enforces Enforcement?: Can Public Prosecutors in Brazil Break the Endless Regress?

Enforcement is one of the greatest challenges in environmental policy-making. Even when policies are well-designed theoretically, they will not deliver the intended effects if the difficulties of enforcement are not explicitly incorporated in their design. Much of the rationale for the use of economic instruments is an attempt to economize on the informational requirements of policies and reduce the need for difficult and costly enforcement. But even in those cases enforcement remains key to success. These difficulties have lead to the search of additional means of monitoring and enforcing environmental policy, such as voluntary self-regulation and private enforcement. Although these schemes can improve enforcement under some circumstances they are not universally applicable and have only limited scope. In this paper I model the interaction of a polluter with an enforcer of environmental policy, and of these two with a third party which enforces enforcement by monitoring and potentially penalizing the first enforcer contingent on realized outcomes. From the model the characteristics of an effective enforcement enforcer are derived. The paper then examines the role of Public Prosecutors in enforcing environmental policy in Brazil and investigates to what extent their peculiar structure, preferences and powers make them effective enforcement enforcers. JEL Classifications: Q52, Q58, D78, P48.