Compliance Regimes and Barriers to Behavioral Change

Abstract

Existing research on compliance failures by individuals and businesses focuses primarily on information and incentive problems. This article develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing barriers to compliance, giving particular attention to resource and autonomy barriers, heterogeneity of the target population, multiple barriers to compliance, and problems that arise when a complex and ongoing set of actions is require to be "in compliance." How governments react to compliance failures is heavily influenced by the social construction and political power of target populations. The propositions developed in the article are tested against the cases of the Swedish individual account pension system and welfare reform in the United States.Many policies can only achieve their objectives if a broad array of ordinary citizens, corporations, or other actors "comply" with those policies, that is, behave in ways that are consistent with the enunciated objectives of the policy. Financing government requires that citizens and corporations pay their taxes. Lowering the emission of greenhouse gases may require increased use of public transit, the purchase of more fuel-efficient vehicles, and a variety other actions by millions of people. Indeed, for some programs, like bans on smoking in public places, changing the behavior of some target group of citizens is the whole point of the policy. Other policies-fair labor standards, pollution laws, and of course tax lawsrequire compliant behavior from businesses (see, e.g., Gray and Shadbegian 2005;Gunningham and Kagan 2005;Mendeloff and Gray 2005).There are substantial and diverse literatures on why individuals and businesses do or do not comply with public policies. These literatures span the fields of political science, economics, law, and psychology (see, e.g.,

Risk and benefit judgment of excreta as fertilizer in agriculture: An exploratory investigation in Rwanda and Uganda

“…However, in reality, proper handwashing behavior remains difficult to instill and hard to sustain, and open defecation habits are hard to eradicate among some individuals and within certain communities. High rates of compliance are unlikely where the targeted individuals lack material and cognitive resources needed to comply even if they are willing to do so (Weaver 2014). For instance albeit preference for handwashing with soap, compliance is difficult to achieve when basic resources such as water and soap are inadequate or lacking.…”

“…In communities where this practice is commonplace, it is characterized largely by unsafe collection of mostly faecal sludge from different types of latrine pits and septic tanks and application of this sludge, usually untreated, directly to agricultural land and fish ponds (Cofie et al 2005;Phuc et al 2006;Knudsen et al 2008;Mackie Jensen et al 2008;Pham-Duc et al 2011, 2014.…”

Institutional Theory and Evolution of ‘A Legitimate’ Compliance Culture: The Case of the UK Financial Service Sector

“…Nielson and Parker (2012) suggest that each business would be holding a 'plural of motives' along this basis. Finally, the extant literature identifies that compliant behaviour might face certain barriers: perceived incentives to comply (incentives and sanctions, monitoring problems, and enforcement problems); willingness to comply (information and cognition problems, attitude and belief problems and peer effects); and capacity to comply (including resource and autonomy problems) (Weaver 2014). These views are consistent with considering that compliance could be based on a multiple dimension legitimacy notion, which is socially constructed by stakeholders including firms and regulators (Suddaby et al 2017).…”

“…This does not indicate a buy in by management of change in compliance culture within the organisation. Inherently, barriers to compliance may exist within these types of organisation through either an unwillingness to engage (Weaver 2014) or a lack of partnership with the regulators (Jackman 2001;Carretta et al 2010). Notably, this is another instance where regulatory actions (sanctions) have not resulted in adjusted public face by the firms in respect to their dysfunctional compliance culture.…”

“Donate your organs, donate life!” Explicitness in policy instruments

“…Although compliance with public policies is a key concern, we know surprisingly little about the precise link between policy instruments and outcomes (e.g. Gofen 2015; Knill et al 2012; see Schaffrin et al 2015 andWeaver 2014 for recent overviews). To improve our understanding of regulatory effectiveness, this paper adds the dimension of explicitness to existing taxonomies of properties of policy instruments.…”