Compliance and Enforcement

Abstract

Compliance and the enforcement patterns used in attempts to achieve it have been major themes in research on regulation, particularly that now-substantial body of work which has been concerned with health and safety, environmental pollution and the regulation of hazardous industrial processes. Although there are important variations, these share significant features: the regulation of largely material hazards by substantial agencies mostly with relatively long traditions, addressing problems which, though they change as industries develop, also involve well established hazards. Agencies and their inspectors hence face the difficulties of keeping all their regulatees up to standards and researchers have focused on how this can be achieved over time with regulatees who present a variety of different faces: cooperative, antagonistic, recalcitrant, incompetent, for example. Most of these studies hence address ‘normal regulation’ (cf. Kuhn’s normal science), that is, regulation which is established, investigating in considerable empirical detail how agencies achieve what they achieve, which may or may not be substantial compliance, what techniques are employed and what constraints limit them.