The scope, costs, and impacts of US environmental policy have been much debated in recent years, as have suggestions for alternatives to the dominant approach adopted in the 1970s. This was direct, or command-and-control, regulation, with industrial facilities the typical object of attention. Yet despite a large and increasingly sophisticated literature on environmental policy, law, administration, and economics, we have surprisingly little systematic analysis of one of the central components of the modern regulatory regime. This is the effort made by industrial polluters to comply with the law and regulations, and the capacity and willingness of both the federal government and the states to monitor compliance and enforce the law, and their success in doing so. These questions are central to the ongoing debate over whether conventional pollution control is working well enough today to achieve environmental quality goals or needs to be supplemented or even replaced by alternatives, such as market incentives, information disclosure, or some form of self-regulation.

To date, many of these arguments have been advanced in normative terms, with critics of regulation suggesting the promise of alternatives and highlighting the many weaknesses of the often adversarial command-and-control regulation, such as its complexity, rigidity, high costs, focus on remedial rather than preventive actions, and lack of incentives for companies to innovate or go beyond compliance with regulatory standards. More recently, critics also have pointed to the inability of the various statutes, singly and collectively, to steer the nation toward the long-term goal of sustainable development, which requires a far more comprehensive and integrated approach to environmental problem solving than is possible with existing environmental laws.

Dietrich Earnhart and Robert Glicksman's Pollution Limits and Polluters' Efforts to Comply brings some much-needed empirical evidence to bear on many of these questions. The book seeks to integrate economics and law in an exhaustive examination of facility compliance with regulatory obligations under one of the premier federal statutes: the Clean Water Act (CWA). The CWA is designed to improve surface water quality through the setting of limits on allowable pollution and the issuance of permits to individual “point sources,” such as industrial facilities. The authors set out to examine four dimensions of water-pollution control policy: the limits imposed on industrial facilities' discharges of pollution; the facilities' efforts to comply with these pollution limits (what they call “environmental behavior”); the facilities' success at controlling their discharges (here called “environmental performance“); and the efforts made by regulators to induce compliance through inspections and enforcement actions, which the authors term “government interventions.”

To study what the facilities have been doing, the authors, one an economist and the other an environmental law scholar, rely on massive US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) databases, as well as on data they have gathered from their own comprehensive survey of all 1,612 chemical manufacturing facilities permitted to discharge wastewater in the year 2002. In particular, they look to linkages between various enforcement actions and industry compliance, thus bringing distinctive empirical data to bear on central questions of regulation, such as the extent of facility noncompliance with permits and the impact of governmental inspections and enforcement. Does government regulation actually induce better environmental behavior and/or environmental performance? Does the setting of more stringent pollution limits improve environmental behavior and/or performance? And does better behavior on the part of industrial facilities like these chemical companies actually lead to improved environmental performance? The success of command-and-control regulation depends on how well we can answer such questions, even as many students of environmental policy look beyond such regulation to address a range of contemporary environmental challenges for which regulation of this kind is not the best policy choice.

Studying what industry is doing by way of pollution control and compliance is not easy. Many companies have a standing policy of not responding to surveys of the kind used here, and response rates generally are low. Earnhart and Glicksman do a little better than most (with a 27% return rate), and they argue that the survey data provide an accurate picture of the way in which the chemical industry is responding to water pollution regulation. Still, one has to wonder if the 700-plus facilities that “refused to participate” in the study might tell a different story. Certainly, the kind of data they pull from the EPA and from their surveys is far better than the often anecdotal case studies on which so much of this literature has relied in the past. As such, the book's highly detailed examination of what corporate leaders have done to comply with the CWA, the progress that they have made, and the reasons for their decisions constitutes a major and valuable contribution to the literature on environmental compliance and enforcement. The book is a treasure trove of data, indeed offering far more on polluters' behavior and performance than many readers would likely want to see. Yet along with the many tables and detailed analysis of the EPA and survey data, the authors offer a well-researched, well-organized, and clearly presented analysis that sets high bars for work of this kind. For those who want to know what efforts industry makes to comply with environmental laws, the data offered here are new and valuable.

Some of the findings reinforce common sense while others do not. For example, the authors find that better environmental behavior (e.g., having a greater quantity and quality of environmental employees, more extensive monitoring, a greater quantity of audits, greater insight from others regarding a facility's environmental management, greater internal communication of environmental goals, and ISO 14001 compliance) appears to improve the facility's environmental performance. The question concerning how different governmental efforts (inspections and enforcement) might improve performance was explored less thoroughly and largely tells us what we already know. For example, the threat of governmental sanctions must be credible to be effective. Yet an ongoing problem with much environmental enforcement is that budgets and staffing of both federal and state agencies are insufficient to permit a level of monitoring and enforcement of, or of technical assistance to, facilities that might motivate them to improve performance.

A few limitations of the study merit mention. One is that the empirical work is related only to the CWA. Compliance with other environmental laws and regulations might not follow the same patterns. Also, the time period for the study is 1999 to 2003, and the results may not be applicable to either earlier or later periods. Those seeking to locate sections of this densely written, 300-page volume will face a significant impediment because the subject index is only two and a half pages long. Similarly, the reference list is very brief, and many of the book's citations within chapters are to legal documents. More seriously, political scientists will find very little mention of the large disciplinary literature on environmental policy and politics, even though some awareness of it might have moved the authors to analyze federal and state enforcement actions somewhat differently, for example, by taking into account state political culture as well as agency resources. Instead, the primary focus is on legal, administrative, and technical aspects of pollution control. Nor does the book draw from or contribute much to the theoretical literature. The objectives are more narrow and practical. That said, the authors do help to clarify and measure facility environmental behavior and performance, which is rare in this literature.