Emission trading: Participation enforcement determines the need for compliance enforcement

Stine Aakre and Jon Hovi
Additional contact information
Stine Aakre: Center for International Climate and Environmental Research - Oslo (CICERO), Norway
Jon Hovi: University of Oslo, Norway and Center for International Climate and Environmental Research - Oslo (CICERO), Norway, jon.hovi@stv.uio.no

European Union Politics, 2010, vol. 11, issue 3, 427-445

Abstract: We identify and explain significant differences between the compliance enforcement systems of three cap-and-trade programmes: the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS), the US SO 2 emission trading programme and the Kyoto Protocol. Because EU-ETS’s compliance enforcement system is somewhat less potent than that of US SO 2 , but vastly more potent than Kyoto’s, it might be tempting to predict that EU-ETS will (1) not quite achieve the SO 2 programme’s near-perfect compliance rates, yet (2) achieve significantly better compliance rates than Kyoto. However, we offer a novel theoretical framework suggesting that how compliance enforcement affects compliance will depend on how the emission trading programme addresses participation. We conclude that while (1) will likely prove correct, (2) will not; Kyoto may even outperform EU-ETS compliance-wise because whereas EU-ETS (and US SO 2 ) specify mandatory participation, most Kyoto member countries participate voluntarily.

Keywords: compliance; emission trading; enforcement; norms; participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116510369265 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:11:y:2010:i:3:p:427-445

DOI: 10.1177/1465116510369265

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().