Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 171

Second, auditing has been drawn into the regulatory framework, as
part of broader changes in state-market relations and a reinvention
of environmental governance. Although often the idea is that environ-
mental auditing is related to regulatory relief, this is not clearly the case
everywhere. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency
has not been very willing to 'compensate' voluntary auditing with
lower inspection levels or a 'managerial turn' in reinventing governance
(cf. Rosenbaum, 2000 ). In some of the European countries, priorities in
inspection do seem sometimes to be set in relation to certified environ-
mental management or auditing systems, be it not always with positive
outcomes. 12 Similar tendencies for regulatory control can be witnessed
in, among others, industrialising countries in Southeast and East Asia
and in developing countries in East Africa, where certified environmen-
tal auditing systems are more than incidentally criteria for lower prior-
ities in inspection and enforcement programs. In addition, a regulatory
space has been created for environmental auditing, where bottom-up
company environmental management connects the internal working of
an economic organisation with state regulatory programs. The initially
voluntary company systems of auditing have increasingly found legal
base in obligations regarding, for instance, environmental reporting.
Denmark was the first European country with legislation on mandatory
company environmental reporting in 1995 (with a revision in 2002),
soon to be followed by the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Spain and
others (Holgaard and Jørgensen, 2005 ). Of course, legislation on com-
pany environmental disclosures and reporting differs between coun-
tries, even between like countries (see, for instance, Nyquist's study
[2003], comparing company disclosure legislation among Denmark,

whereas the final food product can only become HACCP certified if all
production steps have received certification. In the 1990s, the Codex
Alimentarius formulated general guidelines and incorporated HACCP into
food hygiene codes. It is increasingly recognised by governments as a fulfilment
of legal obligations towards food safety, within and outside OECD countries
(Oosterveer, 2005 ).

12

Several cases have been reported in which companies with certified
environmental management and auditing systems met less stringent inspection
regimes, but proved in the end to be among the most severe and illegal
polluters. See, for instance, the mid-1990s case of Tank Cleaning Rotterdam in
the Netherlands, which had a certified environmental management system but
could nevertheless transport chemical waste from ships illegally to Belgium, to
be dumped there as domestic waste (Stevens, 1999 : 79ff).