Unfortunately, there are not many situations like this in today's world. The systems people believe that well specified pollution problems can be solved so long as the incentives faced by human agents have little bearing on the outcome. The methods used to control automobile emissions provide a pertinent example of the systems approach. In contrast, the process approach develops constraints and linkages to them that cause individual decision makers to account for their actions. It focuses on broader environmental outcomes, not inputs.
Monitoring is crucial.
And community participants have an incentive to help monitor. The process approach is better geared for dynamic, multiple pollution situations, where the decision makers and conditions are heterogeneous and the cost of continuously gaining highly technical information and implementing it is very large. The constraints may be rules of property and liability that give rise to costs and rewards to all who are a part of the process. River basin associations and multi-state compacts, which are enlarged common law approaches, embody rules of property and law that yield incentives to reduce the cost of meeting a community's environmental quality constraint. River basin managers monitor outcomes.