New Paper Posted: "Theorizing Regulatory Governance Within its Ecology: The Structure of Management in an Age of Globalization"

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

Regulatory governance is a protean idea that revolves around the structures and character of the exercise of governmental authority beyond the ancient command oriented forms of law.

The implementation of regulatory reform is critically dependent on the existence of appropriate government commitment and institutions. These institutions need to be transparent and accountable, with mandates and sufficient power to ensure that reform translates into action on the ground. They will need to ensure that regulation is part of the policy environment, not simply the tail end of the process. To meet policy objectives, regulation needs to be integrated into the policy cycle, so it can deliver those objectives. (Regulatory Governance: The New Frontier , Governance in Regulatory Oversighthttp://www.oecd.org/regreform/policyconference/46805205.pdf)

In effect, one might start thinking about issues of regulatory governance--within states--as the management of activity through the regulation of markets, activity that may no longer be adequately controlled through conventional law making

I have just posted a draft to the Social Science Research Network. The paper is entitled "Theorizing Regulatory Governance Within its Ecology: The Structure of Management in an Age of Globalization." It considers an aspect of regulatory governance--the management of activity through the regulation of markets, activity that may no longer be adequately controlled through conventional law making--within the broader context of globalized regulatory orders. It makes an initial attempt at thinking through structures of regulatory governance when multiple governance systems interact in globalization. The abstract follows with links to the paper. Comments and reactions always welcome.

Theorizing Regulatory Governance Within its Ecology: The Structure of Management in an Age of Globalization

Larry Catá Backer


ABSTRACT: Regulatory governance is sometimes seen as a thing apart, as another framework within which individuals, and productive forces, may be managed, and through which the institutions of a governance apparatus can be legitimated and deployed. It is a technique—replacing the command imperative of law with the sensibilities of management. It is a form of public government (democratic or party-state)—expanding the administrative possibilities of democratic government. It is the normative expression of self constituting private power within non governmental organizations. It is active, reflexive and reactive. It constitutes its own forms of power and resistance to power. It exists simultaneously within the same physical space. But regulatory governance also poses a number of important fundamental ordering questions, touching on issues of aggregation (regulatory governance and its connection to the ecologies of globalization), disaggregation (distilling the complex interactions that together produce the sustainable habitat for global regulatory governance), coherence (a centered or anarchic ecology), sustainability (systemicity and autonomy) and ideology (regulatory governance as instrument or as typology). This paper considers these questions. Its thesis is this: Regulatory governance is a normative system with its own ecology, a set of normative values and procedural constraints that serve both to structure the internal workings of each regulatory governance order and the relationships and interactions—the structural couplings of regulatory governance in those spaces in which they meet, intermesh, and conflict. The rules of these interactions represents the new constitutional law of regulatory governance systems (and the apparatus through which they are activated); the rules of governance interactions represents the new international law of regulatory governance systems (through which they engage with each other within the global orders). These new orders hold together and constrain the emerging structures of power. But they also challenge the fundamental ordering basis on which the contemporary order rests—sovereignty, democratic representation, classical separation of powers, the separation of public and private orders, and the traditional separation of powers.