The clean energy, and appliance efficiency and quality sectors are working tirelessly towards a more sustainable world. These efforts are significant, but it is critical that professionals and policymakers account for compliance in their strategies – a critical activity that helps to protect the anticipated benefits of energy efficiency policies and sustainable technologies for consumers, the market, and the planet.

Learn more about Why Compliance Counts.

The CLASP Compliance Toolkit offers up-to-date, accessible and interactive resources to help countries design effective policy implementation and enforcement strategies and mechanisms to improve compliance and lock in the benefits of adopting clean energy technologies and energy efficiency and quality standards.

Want to access more of CLASP’s compliance resources? Visit our research library.

For questions & feedback, please contact Lina Kelpsaite at lkelpsaite@clasp.ngo.

Robust compliance activities protect national markets from non-compliant products and safeguard benefits of adopted energy efficiency and quality policies. Although compliance plays a key role in policy implementation, it is often overlooked or delayed. Governments, funders, and development partners perceive the efforts and resources required to design and enforce strong compliance frameworks to be inhibitory. Challenges also arise in evaluating the associated impacts.

There is currently no clear methodology to estimate the benefits of compliance, such as measuring the reduced number of non-compliant products on the market, to provide a compelling reasoning for the investment in compliance-related initiatives. Testing a large number of products from the market to assess non-compliance rate is cost-prohibitive for many.

Recognizing the challenges that governments face in measuring market non-compliance rates, CLASP developed the Non-Compliance Risk Assessment Tool (NC-RAT) to underscore compliance’s importance. NC-RAT serves as an initial step for the policymakers and others to:

• Assess national compliance processes for product energy efficiency and quality programs, and associated market non-compliance risk
• Advance policy compliance and enforcement by identifying specific gaps, prioritize investment in compliance processes with greatest impact to strengthening them
• Build a case for investment in policy compliance and enforcement initiatives
• Track progress/improvement of compliance efforts, e.g., conduct initial assessment to set the benchmark and assess the compliance program regularly, i.e., on an annual basis.

NC-RAT is an easy-to-use tool that is based on a qualitative assessment of national compliance programs and organized under five Indicators: Regulation, Resources, Certification & Registration, Market Surveillance & Enforcement, and Compliance Communication. Each Indicator includes relevant questions for the user to respond to, based on which, the Tool calculates scores for 1) each Indicator and 2) a corresponding overall score for market non-compliance risk. The tool also provides initial recommendations for how policymakers can strengthen compliance programs, based on individual user responses

To learn more about how to use the NC-RAT, watch this how-to video for a step-by-step tutorial.

For questions and inquiries on the NC-RAT, suggestions for improvement, sharing country’s assessment results, etc. please contact Lina Kelpsaite at lkelpsaite@clasp.ngo.