Does the sunshine regulatory approach work?: Governance and regulation model of the urban waste services in Portugal

This document presents the governance model of the urban waste services in Portugal. The main issue addressed here is related to the fact that the urban waste services in Portugal are regulated by a sector-specific regulator, an atypical situation in Europe and even in other continents. The Portuguese regulator, beyond its responsibility for the economic regulation of some segments of the sector, determines a set of performance indicators for each operator and compares and displays publicly the results (sunshine regulation). In this way, the operators with a poor performance become “embarrassed” and will try to correct the deviations. This approach has led to very good outcomes by fostering the improvement of performance in the whole sector.