Compliance Construction in the Context of Environmental Regulation

This article explores compliance in the context of environmental regulation. It rejects a formal concept of compliance according to which statements about compliance can be made by assessing a self-contained notion of social practices of the regulated in the light of formal legal rules. Linked to this type of analysis is the notion of a 'gap' between formal legal requirements and what the regulated do in practice. In examining this perspective critically the article argues that the concepts of rules and social practices have to be seen not as self-contained categories but as closely linked. These close links are created both on a level of behaviour, through what the regulators and the regulated actually do in practice, and on a level of meaning of rules. Thus the notion of a 'gap' needs to be complemented through a concept of integration between rules and social practices. The article develops this argument by drawing first on literature on enforcement, discretion and creative compliance; and second by relying on qualitative empirical data on the implementation of a waste management site licence by staff at a waste treatment plant and the enforcement activities of waste control officers.