And regulators are not the only source of pressure on plants to improve environmental performance. Communities and markets also play important roles. Traditional regulation The law and regulators traditionally set and enforce the rules of environmental behavior. Prices and tradable permits can be effective under the right conditions. But research and field experience show that conventional regulation pays too little attention to defining the right conditions.
Monitoring is often so poor that compliance is difficult to assess.
When collected, data on factory emissions are often held by separate agencies with different responsibilities. Information on abatement costs is rarely available. Agencies responsible for monitoring air and water quality rarely talk with each other or with those responsible for monitoring emissions. Human and technical resources. Agencies generally have little capacity for assessing the benefits of alternative programs and using the results to establish priorities for allocating scarce resources.