ISBN: 9789264059580

Release: 15/06/2009

Despite progress in recent years, there is growing evidence that OECD countries are not on track to reach some of their key environmental goals. Achieving these goals is often difficult because of insufficient compliance with regulatory requirements.

So far, environmental compliance and enforcement has attracted relatively little attention from national environmental authorities in OECD countries, compared with efforts to optimise the design of environmental policies and instruments. This has often led to inadequate consideration of likelihood of compliance and of the enforcement capacities required to meet environmental policy objectives.

This study is a first attempt to examine in a systematic way a range of environmental compliance assurance systems. It engaged environmental authorities in six OECD countries – Finland, France, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States – and two major emerging economies – China and Russia – in a comparative analysis of their compliance and enforcement instruments, the ways in which they are applied, and the results achieved.

The report is intended to provide policy makers, environmental regulators, and other stakeholders with:
• Better understanding of factors that affect the design and performance of compliance assurance strategies and instruments;
• Insights into how scarce environmental enforcement agency resources can be used to achieve the greatest environmental outcome;
• Information on ways in which the cost burden of compliance assurance instruments on the regulated community can be reduced; and
• Greater awareness of measures to increase accountability of enforcement authorities, enhance transparency in their relationship with the regulated community and the public, and improve feedback to policy making.