About the ECC

The Environmental Compliance Consortium is a voluntary collaboration among state environmental agencies to improve the effectiveness of their compliance and enforcement programs with the goal of improving the environment. The ECC works to develop better ways for agencies to measure, manage, motivate, and communicate compliance and environmental performance of regulated facilities in each state.  The Consortium also provides agency managers with the opportunity to share experiences and receive informal peer feedback on strategies for improving state enforcement and compliance programs.

The ECC Concept

The Compliance Consortium is a collaborative effort among state environmental agencies to develop better ways to:

• Measure and manage the environmental and compliance performance of regulated entities
• Apply those measures to evaluate the most effective government strategies for improving compliance and performance levels
• Develop improved analytic methods for finding compliance problems
• Share new developments in compliance measurement and analysis with practitioners throughout the country so that environmental program effectiveness will continually improve
• Build an institutional capactiy among the states to learn, collectively, from their experiences and to remember them over time

The Compliance Consortium hopes to address two separate areas of public need. First, it was created to test a new approach to collaborative governance, an approach that could prove invaluable for improving government effectiveness in a federalist system. It is also designed to surmount one of the most persistent barriers inhibiting innovation in environmental management, the pervasive reliance on "enforcement beans" as an indicator of environmental program effectiveness.

Building a Lateral Learning Network among the States

As states have become increasingly capable over the last three decades, they have begun to assume many of the responsibilities formerly handled by the federal government. With so much of the activity of environmental governance occurring at the state level, learning from state experience is critical. What is seldom discussed is the need for an institutional mechanism to analyse the experiments running in the states, described by Justice Louis Brandeis as "laboratories for democracy." Without some analysis and sharing of experience, governments repeat the implementation mistakes of their colleagues. They don't get smarter but rather waste resources and miss opportunities for gains in program effectiveness and social outcomes. The challenge that faces us today is to build systems that enable states, localities, and the national government to learn from each other's experience in effective government management. We need to build a collective learning network among the multiple governmental parties engaged. The Compliance Consortium intends to build that network.

The "Enforcement Beans" Barrier

The second need this project addresses stems from current approaches used to assess state and EPA enforcement and compliance performance. Enforcement is and will always be a central part of an effective environmental management system. The need and the problem arises from the way performance of government compliance and enforcement programs is measured. "Enforcement beans" -- tallies of enforcement activity levels (more specifically the number of enforcement actions initiated and the dollar amount of enforcement penalties collected) -– are routinely used as the primary indicator of the performance of federal and state environmental programs instead of their more appropriate use for management information.

The intense focus on enforcement beans creates a number of unintentional problems, especially for those trying to develop smarter ways to protect the environment. New measures need to be developed that afford managers and outside observers an alternate method that more accurately captures the effectiveness of environmental programs. Only when these measures are developed, tested, and adopted in multiple locations will the system be able to escape its current dependence on enforcement beans. The Compliance Consortium has been created to facilitate the development of both these new measures and new methods for identifying enforcement problems and achieving increased levels of compliance.

What the Project Is Not About

The scope of the Compliance Consortium, as currently conceived, is limited to improving the environmental performance of regulated entities or of those who legally should be regulated even if they have not yet come into the regulatory system. While there are significant environmental problems that need to be addressed generated by those not regulated (e.g., households, and farmers), those problems are outside the scope of the Consortium. For now, Consortium efforts are focused on improving the environmental performance (including “beyond compliance” performance) of regulated and should-be-regulated entities.

Long Term Dream

This project could serve as the foundation for building an ongoing institutional capacity that enables states to learn from each other’s experience more easily and effectively and to pool their resources for research and demonstration projects across the range of environmental management challenges. It is exciting to think about the possibility and value of having a repository of knowledge and a locus of experimentation that engages those who care about improved management of the environmental protection system.

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Beginnings

The University of Maryland School of Public Affairs convened an initial meeting of potentially interested states and the Environmental Law Institute in the fall of 1997 to discuss the project concept and ascertain state interest in participating in it. A concept paper prepared for that meeting was then shared with selected states, representatives of environmental interest groups, leaders of U.S. EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, and an EPA regional enforcement manager. In addition, meetings were held with representatives of two business associations heavily involved in environmental policy and the Executive Director of the Environmental Council of States, a group representing the senior environmental managers of U.S. states and territories. The inaugural meeting of the Compliance Consortium was held in Idaho in October 1998.

Based on the strong level of state and general interest, the University of Maryland sought foundation support to launch the Compliance Consortium. Funding for the Compliance Consortium has been received from the Pew Charitable Trusts and from the Joyce Foundation. In addition, states provide in-kind and financial support.

The initial project concept was revised to reflect suggestions of those consulted. For example, the initial project focused primarily on compliance measurement. The project has been revised to encourage inclusion of not just compliance measures, but pollution prevention and reduction measures as well. Also, the project may address not only the need to develop alternative compliance assurance strategies and measurements, but also to strengthen states’ ability to enforce more effectively and to identify and analyze patterns of non-compliance.

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Mission and Goals

Information and Ideas

The Compliance Consortium will try to collect better information about:

• The best practices currently (or historically) being used to measure compliance, beyond compliance, and enforcement performance, and
• Strategies for defining and identifying compliance and enforcement problems, such as who are the worst offenders, how to find them, and how to change their behavior.

The Consortium also hopes to develop new ideas where best practices are not as effective as they could be.

Experiments

The Compliance Consortium will try to build on best practices identified and the new ideas generated, to commence field tests that:

• test new ways to measure performance,
• test new ways to define and identify problems,
• test the shared use of common performance measurement metrics and methodologies across multiple states.

Lessons Learned

The Compliance Consortium will try to document important past practices and the experience of Consortium field tests, appropriately (e.g., at a reasonable cost) and objectively, so that the lessons of state experience will be learned and retained whether the experiment succeeded or not.

Increased Capacity

The Compliance Consortium will try to:

• help state staff acquire knowledge and skills that allow them to improve compliance and enforcement practices in their own state.
• create a “virtual team” of compliance and enforcement innovators and experts that serve as easy resources for each other across the states. A goal of the Consortium is to make the whole more than the sum of the parts.

New Practices

The Compliance Consortium seeks to have the information gathered and the experiments tried lead to the routine use of better performance metrics, problem-identification, and problem-solving strategies.

Enhanced Interstate Communication

The Compliance Consortium will make it easier for state leadership and staff, as well as local and federal staff, to learn about smart enforcement and compliance management practices taking places elsewhere.

Improve Management Information and Shift Oversight Emphasis to Results

The Compliance Consortium will develop a few common metrics state managers can use to:

• benchmark their performance with other states, and
• incorporate into state/EPA environmental Performance Partnership Agreements, allowing EPA to focus oversight attention on enforcement and compliance results in a way not currently possible.

Education

We want to create an educational program that will help those not participating directly in the project acquire new knowledge, skills, understanding, and ways of thinking about and improving enforcement and compliance management.

Criteria for Assessing Program Performance

The Compliance Consortium will try to clarify the criteria for, or characteristics of, enforcement and compliance programs that are effective and worthy of documentation and replication.

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Targets of Our Efforts

Limited Sense of Program Effectiveness

Government environmental protection agencies have very limited means for assessing whether the enforcement and compliance assistance programs we are managing work.

Wrong Indicators

One fundamental problem is the use of inappropriate metrics to measure program performance. Indicators such as the number of inspections, the number of enforcement actions initiated, and the amount of fines collected are seriously limited as performance measures and risk motivating nonsensical actions. This problem is exacerbated by overly vague and varied definitions of non-compliance that, for example, inadequately distinguish between repeat violators and occasional violators or between violations that have serious environmental consequences and those that do not.

Reliable and Good Models Are Costly and Hard to Find

Reliable information identifying and describing strong enforcement programs is not readily available. That which does exist was often generated to support the political outreach requirements of an implementation strategy. While that is important, it does not provide sufficient nor objective information for other states interested in replication.

Lessons from Failed Experiements are Even Harder to Find

Reliable information about programs that have been tried are even more difficult to find, especially if they encountered problems, leading to unnecessary repetition of mistakes.

Weak Skills for Thinking Strategically about Compliance Problems

We lack systems and theories for identifying important hazards, risks, or patterns of non-compliance (e.g., do those with the highest levels of workmen’s compensation claims have the worst environmental compliance behavior?).

Fairness

We have no sense of the fairness of our enforcement and compliance assurance programs, whether or not similar business entities face the same likelihood of being penalized for poor environmental performance.

Cross-State Violators not Detected

We lack the capacity to identify companies that exhibit similar violation patterns in multiple states.

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