Measuring Environmental Enforcement Success: The Elusive Search for Objectivity

How best to measure the effectiveness of environmental enforcement is a long-standing question . Over the 42 years during which the U .S . Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has engaged in enforcement work, the agency’s system for evaluating its own enforcement efforts (as well as those of the states) has evolved considerably . Beginning with a simple counting of numbers of formal enforcement actions taken, the Agency has added measures such as the volume of pollutants cleaned up as a result of enforcement activities, the beneficial public health impacts of enforcement actions, and the number of years of incarceration of criminal defendants convicted of environmental crimes . Recently, EPA stirred renewed interest in how to measure enforcement success . Its Draft FY 2014-2018 Strategic Plan suggested a new set of “Next Generation Compliance” metrics . Those “Next Gen” measurements include the number of regulated sources using advanced monitoring technologies to measure their own emissions, the number of enforcement settlements that resulted from or that incorporate advanced monitoring, the number of sectors for which measurable compliance rate strategies have been adopted, and the percentage of facilities that electronically report Clean Water Act (CWA)1 compliance data to EPA and to authorized states and tribal governments . Although the Agency deleted those measurements from its final FY 2014-2018 Strategic Plan,2 the questions they raised remain .