Command And Control Vs. Cooperative Federalism: Comparing Environmental Enforcement Models In The USA and India
- IJLLR Journal
- 3 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Prof. (Dr.) V.J. Praneshwaran, Director, CMR School of Legal Studies
Abishek Paul Naragani, LLM Candidate, CMR School of Legal Studies
1. Introduction
Environmental governance has emerged as a foundational concern in the twenty-first century, demanding urgent attention from both domestic legal systems and international regimes. Escalating climate change impacts, biodiversity loss, increasing pollution levels, and resource depletion have all necessitated the evolution of robust legal frameworks for environmental protection. Among these frameworks, the mechanism of enforcement plays a pivotal role in ensuring the efficacy of environmental laws. Enforcement ensures compliance with prescribed norms, penalises transgressors, and signals the state’s commitment to sustainable development.
Across jurisdictions, environmental enforcement models typically take two dominant forms: the command-and-control (CAC) approach and cooperative federalism. The former is characterized by centralized regulatory oversight, direct statutory prescriptions, and stringent penalties, often with limited discretion afforded to administrative or local authorities. In contrast, cooperative federalism is predicated on a shared distribution of responsibilities between federal and state governments, fostering flexibility, mutual collaboration, and context-specific regulatory execution. This paper seeks to comparatively evaluate these two approaches by focusing on their development and operationalization in two major federal democracies: the United States of America and the Republic of India.
The United States offers a mature model of cooperative federalism in environmental governance, shaped by decades of jurisprudence, agency evolution, and legislative innovation. Federal environmental statutes such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act incorporate mechanisms that allow states to administer and enforce programs, provided they meet or exceed federal standards. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversees the process, balancing national objectives with localized autonomy. On the other hand, India, despite having a federal constitutional structure, has evolved a largely centralized command-and-control regime in environmental matters. Statutes such as the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, vest substantial powers in the Central Government and its agencies, with limited decentralization in practice. The model presumes uniformity in environmental conditions and administrative capacities across diverse Indian states, leading to both implementation challenges and jurisdictional ambiguities.
