The Environmental Law Institute has recently undertaken a research project on the enforcement of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 for the National Commission on Water Quality. The project is designed to determine the effectiveness of the new enforcement provisions of the Act, to assess the role of citizen suits in achieving the objectives of the Act, and to evaluate the relationships between and among state and federal agencies involved in enforcement activities.

The project will address a number of specific questions, among them the suitability in different situations of each of the enforcement mechanisms provided in §309 of the Act, including civil penalties, criminal fines, injunctive relief and administrative orders. It will seek to learn the extent to which the threat of a citizen suit promotes voluntary compliance with the Act's requirements. It will also attempt to define the circumstances for which federal enforcement may continue to be appropriate in states which are operating federally approved NPDES permit programs.