[SOUND] Welcome to our course on Environmental Management & Ethics. Today, I would like to talk to you about command and control regulation. My name is Steffen Foss Hansen, I'm associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark, at the department of environmental engineering. Command and control regulation is one of the most preferred ways of managing the environment today. It's defined as the direct regulation of an industry or activity by legislation that states specifically what is permitted and what is illegal. The command part of command and control regulation is the presentation of, for instance, quality standards/targets that are defined by a government that must be complied with by a given social actor, such as, for instance, an industrial industry. The control part relates or signifies the negative sanctions that may result from noncompliance, and that could, for instance, be prosecution. Command and control regulation encompasses a variety of different methods. It could be attempt to influence our behavior as individuals through various laws. Providing incentives, providing threats, contracts, and various agreements. There's a given perception of a problem and a given perception of what the solution is to this problem. And this is sequentially implemented. So in that sense command and control regulation assumes a very high level of between the cause and the effect of a given problem. When it comes to whether command and control regulation is effective, is very much depends on enforcement as well as compliance in regards to it. Very high level of compliance has to be ensured in order for command and control regulation to be effective. And non-compliance represents one of the most serious challenges to the overall effectiveness of command and control. Of course, appropriate implementation, and enforcement is required. It very often involves using uniform sanctions, so which arguably means that small businesses might feel the sanctions much harder than larger businesses. And some have argued that that is problematic from a ethical and also practical point of view. A good example of a command and control regulation is Europe's chemical legislation known as REACH. REACH was implemented in June 2007 and entered into force. REACH stands for registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals. The legislation, first of all, establishes a European Chemical Agency. It puts the burden on industry that is producing or importing chemicals to Europe. Puts the burden on them to provide safety data, and do the chemical safety assessment of the chemicals that they produce and import. If they fail to provide this data, at least according to the legislation, then no data, no marketing principle follows, which means that industry that does not provide the data, they're not allowed to market their products in Europe. It also states that it's important that use and safety information has to go up and down the production stream and the use stream. When it comes to registration of chemicals, REACH is very, very specific. And in that sense, it's a good example of, they're very specific requirements that we very often see when it comes to command and control regulation. In this example, substances manufactured or imported in volumes above 1 ton needs registration according to the REACH regulation. There are a certain number of very specific registration deadlines that industries have to meet. The first one was in November 2007, where all substances produced or imported in more than 1,000 tons for instance needed registration. We also have a deadline coming up in May 2018, where all substances produced between 1 and 100 ton, they need to be registered by industry with the European Chemicals Agency. For each registration, a technical dossier has to be submitted by industry to the European Chemicals Agency. And the legislation is very specific in regards to what this technical dossier needs to entail. First of all, it needs to provide physicochemical, ecological and toxicological data. It has to provide information on how the products are used. The potential for human environmental exposure. There has to be information about how the chemical is classified and labeled. And there has to be information about the safe uses of each application of the chemical. For substances produced for more than 10 tonnes per producer, or import it per year, a so called chemical safety report has to be submitted, as well. This chemical safety report should include human health hazard assessment, physicochemical hazard assessment and environmental hazard assessment, in evaluation of persistency by accumulation and toxicity and proposals for any further testing should also be made in this technical dossier. The exact amounts of information that has to be included in the technical dossier or in the chemical safety assessment, our tonnage dependent. For instance, when it comes to chemicals produced between 10 and 100 ton, this chemical safety assessment has to include physical chemical properties, an assessment of skin sensitation, eye irritation, and mutagenicity and acute toxicity. A short term test on one aquatic invertebrate, an assessment of degradation, biotic and ready biodegradability. A repeat 28 toxicity study on 1 animal species. A reproductive study, a toxicokinetic study a short-term study on fish, an activated sludge inhibition test, and finally, an assessment of the environmental fate and behavior. So I hope that this short example that we had with REACH, gives you an impression about how detailed some of the commands can sometimes be when it comes to command and control regulation in Europe. It's quite clear that REACH entails a lot of command. Many of the quality standards and targets that government authorities have postulated that industry now have to comply with and they have to provide all of this data. Of course, it could be argued that so far when it comes to REACH there’s actually been quite limited control of the data that industry has submitted to the European chemical agency, but that's something that is being discussed very much between various stakeholders in the field at the moment. So far, we have not seen very many negative sanctions that may result from non-compliance of REACH. But it's important to remember that REACH is still in the implementation phase, and that we might see negative sanctions apply in the future. But so far, it could seem that some elements of REACH are a little bit in violation with some of the good command and control principles. First of all, the fact that a high level of compliance must be ensured is something that arguably is not being ensured at the moment. And the fact that non-compliance represents a serious challenge to the overall effectiveness of REACH is something that has also been generally recognized. When it comes to command and control regulation, overall, there is some questionable presumptions that one has to keep in mind when considering choosing a command and control regulation to meet, and maybe manage a given environmental dilemma. First of all, it's based on the belief that regulators could actually set up legal rules, prescriptions, covering comprehensively the majority of the harmful and dangerous environmental problems. And that's something that one could argue that regulators very seldom have this over-comprehensive insight into a given environmental problem that actually allows them to setup very specific rules of thumb. It requires a very frequent visiting and thorough examination of all enterprises and institutions that might be involved and, in that sense, it puts a very big burden on regulators to actually control whether the specified requirements are being followed. It also assumes that one can objectively and readily determine whether active and standard has been met or not. And that's very seldom the case. It requires inspectors are willing to act as policemen, and in that way, sometimes also hamper constructive dialogue between, for instance, industry and regulators about what the best environmental approach might be to a given problem. It assumes that corporate behavior and mentality can change as a result overview of persecution and litigation. And that's something that we've seen from the past. It's very seldom, the case. People do not change behavior, normally, when it comes to environmental management, out of fear of being prosecuted or litigated.. With that, thank you very much for your attention. [MUSIC]
