Implementing Environmental Regulation: Enforcement and Compliance

The last three decades have seen the emergence of environmental regulation as a major activity of governments in the United States and elsewhere. As the stringency of those regulations has increased so too has the incentive for non-compliance and the need to enforce. It is obvious that enforcement issues matter in designing and appraising any regulatory regime. Cost-benefit evaluation of a particular piece of regulation which implicitly assumes full compliance is likely to be misleading if ‘slippage’ generically occurs during implementation particularly if that slippage is substantial. Of course true compliance rates with regulatory requirements are often, by their nature, difficult to know with any certainty. Published government statistics need to be interpreted with care. ‘Compliant’ is almost always the default categorization such that a polluting source being deemed compliant means only that the agency has failed to demonstrate non-compliance. (This can be a very different thing a 1979 report