ENFORCEMENT AND COMPLIANCE PROGRAMS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

This paper provides an overview of environmental legislation in Central America. Regional legal instruments have been developed and have gone into effect at the initiative of the Central American Commission on Environment and Development (Comisión Centroamericana de Ambiente y Desarrollo) including Central American Agreements on biodiversity and protected areas, forestry resources, climatic change, and dangerous waste. More recently a political proposal has been made for an Alliance for Sustainable Development (Alianza para el Desarrollo Sostenible). An incipient juridical framework exists at the national level. There are constitutional grounds for environmental protection. There are important gaps in the development of juridical instruments, especially regarding environmental sanitation matters; at present, the main challenge is the imposition of quality standards. In other cases, such as forestry resources, an effort has been made to promote an administrative organization with its corresponding procedures, but real results in the reduction of the deforestation rates have not been achieved. The general conclusion is that environmental legislation in Central America is very weakly applied and has low compliance