ABSTRACT
The regulatory enforcement literature contains a wide variety of works, both conceptual and empirical, that examine how the enforcement styles of individual regulators influence the effectiveness of a regulatory regime. A key debate in this literature concerns the relative effectiveness of various enforcement styles – adversarial compared with cooperative, formal compared with informal, coercive compared with non-coercive, and so on – in achieving compliance from those regulated. Competing arguments in the debate have been drawn from experiences concerning environmental, health, and safety regulation in a wide variety of countries. Irrespective of the inconclusiveness of the debate, a major limitation of the literature is that most of the cross-national comparisons were drawn from advanced, industrialized democracies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom and various other Western European countries. Little is known about how regulatory styles affect enforcement effectiveness in developing countries, which often present more challenging work environments for enforcement officials.
