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Executive and regulatory agencies are decentralized state organizations that implement policies. When the law clearly defines the policy, we have a state policy; when it leaves the precise definition to the incumbent administration, we have a government policy. Regulatory agencies are supposed to execute state policies and be more autonomous from the administration, whereas executive agencies will be less autonomous politically but equally independent in administrative terms. Policies introduced by executive agencies are supposed to change the moment that the opposition political party or political coalition wins an election and a new administration begins, whereas the policies introduced by regulatory policies do not change so easily. Government policies may be changed either by the parliament or by the executive, whereas state policies may be changed only by the parliament. Executive agencies are supposed to have administrative autonomy, regulatory agencies, decision autonomy, but policies are not or should not be their responsibility.

This chapter focuses on the creation of new independent regulatory agencies and signing of thousands of bilateral investment treaties during the era of liberalization. This was another massive experiment with the logic of discipline. But the experiment did not always produce the expected results. Governments sometimes escaped the constraints they had promised to honor. And where constraints continued to bind, troubling questions about the corrosion of democratic governance were raised.

The chapter discusses some of the risk assessment issues that arise in administrative agencies charged with regulating carcinogens. It is argued that present assessment strategies, as well as some recommended by commentators, both of which are inspired by the paradigm of research science—the use of careful, detailed, science-intensive, substance-by-substance risk assessments—paralyze regulation. The identification, assessment, and regulation of potential carcinogens are all too slow to evaluate adequately the existing universe of 50,000–100,000 chemical substances, and the 1,000–1,500 new ones that are added each year. Thus, for identified carcinogens we need to adopt something like the expedited approximation procedures, which permit faster evaluation of potentially toxic substances. Alternative approaches to regulatory science which acknowledge and use normative considerations to guide assessment procedures and which recognize the importance of the rate of evaluation will expedite risk assessments and reduce regulatory false negatives and underregulation.

This chapter shows how and why policy forms of internationalisation helped to undermine well-entrenched institutions in France, Germany, and Italy that had survived previous attempts at reform. Policy makers feared regulatory competition from Britain after its reforms of 1984 while EU regulation from 1988 offered occasions for change, arguments to legitimate reform, and opportunities for national champions to become international ones. Aided by these two international factors, governments and national suppliers formed broader reform coalitions that were able to overcome strong resistance and introduce sweeping institutional changes, notably privatisation of incumbent suppliers, termination of monopolies, and delegation of powers to independent sectoral agencies. Thus, by 2005, France, Germany, and Italy had broken with deeply-rooted domestic institutions that protected national suppliers from competition. Instead, they had adopted an institutional model of a liberalised market with private suppliers and independent regulatory agencies, which was similar to that in Britain but reached through a different route.

This chapter explores the tension between conservatives’ opposition to the growth of government regulation in principle and their willingness to accommodate it in practice. It focuses especially on this clash in the context of the period of Republican ascendency (1998–2008). The chapter explains why conservatives are hostile to regulation and the various efforts to limit growth as well as reasons for the failure to do so. It offers suggestions for developing conservative ideas and policies on regulation.

The chapter addresses a problem that affects both regulatory and tort law efforts to control exposure to carcinogens. What should be done when a disease may be the result of “joint causation”? That is, there are two or more possible causes, each of which alone would be sufficient to explain the presence of disease. Tort law has developed a solution to this problem which has recently been adopted by some courts considering toxic torts. However, the problem of joint causation and more general issues raised by causation reveal weaknesses in tort law for compensating victims exposed to toxic substances. Because of these and other problems with tort law, administrative institutions at least in principle may better control human exposure to toxic substances. However, such institutions face enough practical problems that they will not always reliably protect people from toxic substances. In the end, the chapter argues, there are several good reasons for preferring administrative agencies to tort law to provide environmental health protection. However, these theoretical advantages should not blind us to some of the political shortcomings of relying on administrative agencies. For that reason such agencies should not replace tort law, which can continue to serve a backup function to the agencies in our legal system.

This chapter explores the accountability of UK regulators by looking at the capacity of organizations to call a regulatory agency to account. It identifies five key challenges facing anyone seeking to call regulators to account: the scale of the regulatory landscape; the problems of multiple hands, shifting roles and blame-shifting; the technical complexity and contestability of the regulatory task; the opacity of regulatory processes; and the willingness of the accountee to be called to account. It then explores how these challenges are manifested and addressed in the activities of intra-executive organizations charged with implementing the ‘better regulation’ agenda; parliamentary select committees; the National Audit Office; and consumer panels.In each case, the chapter examines the significance of accountability capacity and institutional position in the ability to call regulators to account, and the fluidity of roles that an accountor can play in regulatory processes.

Despite being the most advanced in the world, pesticide regulatory agencies in the United States and California have failed to address the pesticide drift problem properly. The history of pesticide regulation in the United States shows ignorance toward public health and environmental concerns, and demonstrates how chemical and agricultural industries influence regulatory decision making at the state and federal levels. The US Department of Agriculture, responsible for agricultural development, protection, and promotion in the nation, has been found to be ignoring the concerns raised by the Public Health Service and Food and Drug Administration over the adverse effects of pesticide use in agriculture. This chapter focuses on material, cultural, and discursive factors to elaborate regulatory agencies’ failures to deal with the pesticide drift problem. It further discusses efforts made by the pesticide drift activists to reform pesticide regulation in the United States and California.

This chapter focuses exclusively on the question of institutional competence, and the two chapters that follow examine the other arguments for and against preemption. Among other things, this chapter explores arguments about comparative strengths and weaknesses of common law courts and federal regulatory agencies in providing technical expertise, policymaking expertise, relevant information, common-sense judgment, and responsiveness to changing information and policies as they arise. The most vigorous argument for federal agency preemption of state common law claims is probably the “enormous comparative advantage” that federal agencies have over judges and juries in the expertise required to resolve highly technical questions of science, engineering, and economics that typically arise when federal regulatory requirements arguably come into conflict with common law duties. Proponents of preemption argue that regulatory agencies are able to call on expert resources and information-gathering abilities “that dwarf those of any trial jury.”

This chapter explores the extent to which regulatory agencies in the developing world can be considered a relevant institutional innovation for the politics of regulation in these countries. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section concentrates on the political economy of agency creation beyond the occasional reasons that contributed to its formal establishment in many developing countries, particularly during the 1990s, due to coercive, isomorphic, or symbolic mechanisms of diffusion. The second section considers the issue of the independence of regulatory agencies, but only in the context of the developing world, reflecting the contributions to this volume and also previous research on this topic. The final section concludes with a few remarks on the challenges of studying the regulatory state in the South.

This chapter explores hypotheses that could explain the differences in the design of Brazilian independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) in the telecommunications and electricity sectors. It critically interrogates the ‘political bias’ hypothesis, which suggests that ‘political bias’ affects the implementation of IRAs in Latin America. Evidence indicates support for a revised version of the ‘political bias’ hypothesis on sectoral divergence in Brazil, suggesting that bureaucratic resistance to reform may be the cause of variations between regulatory reform in the electricity and in telecommunications sectors.

This chapter explores ideas of regulatory diffusion and transplant. It argues that the existing literature, which focuses on channels of diffusion and macro-contextual variables of sectors and countries, insufficiently accounts for how the nature of institutional outcomes are shaped by the way regulatory agencies are adopted and embedded into national political economies. Using the case of Indian electricity regulation, it suggests that when adoption is driven more by the role of external actors rather than national policy choices, there is little scope for ex ante deliberation of the role regulatory agencies can and should play within national governance systems. Instead, the functioning of regulatory agencies are better explained by ex post adjustment, as agencies seek to accommodate existing political pressures, accompanied by efforts to explain and justify the foundational myth on which regulator adoption was based. Regulatory outcomes are then incompletely explained by macro-context and institutional form alone, but instead require understanding micro-details of local political and institutional arrangements. The chapter calls for attention to micro-politics and local specificities of the process through which regulatory agencies are embedded in national political contexts.

The chapter traces mechanisms through which the Labour Governments from 1997, then, from 2010, the Coalition Government, sought to embed a new regulatory agenda under the auspices of ‘Better Regulation’. What is described as a feverish and relentless programme of re-regulation consists of four central mechanisms: a long term rhetorical assault on regulation as burdensome, red tape and so on; the establishment of a plethora of institutions within and of Government; various legal reform initiatives which have delivered both de-regulation and re-regulation; and a constant stream of reviews of specific regulatory agencies and of the practice and purpose of regulation in general. Better Regulation is a concerted effort at re-regulation, an attempt to re-configure the relationships between state and private capital. Moreover, while the claimed effect is that capital is being set ‘free’, these processes in fact engender a deeper and more intense inter-dependence between state and capital.

This chapter presents a typology of global regulation, which differentiates the institutional setting for rule-making, which is either public or private, from the global selection process, which is either market based or nonmarket based. Four types of global regulatory governance are discussed. The first type, termed “public (governmental) nonmarket standard-setting,” involves collaboration through traditional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) or transgovernmental cooperation among domestic regulators. The second type is market-based private regulation, which entails rule-making by firms or other bodies competing, individually or in groups, to establish their preferred technologies or practices as the de facto standard through market dominance or other strategies. The third type of global regulation—private yet nonmarket-based—is regulation by focal rule-making institutions, such as the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The fourth type of regulation results from market-like international competition between public regulatory agencies.

This chapter focuses on two particular types of government networks among financial regulators: central bankers, securities regulators, insurance commissioners, and antitrust officials. It discusses that the first type of government networks are those that are relatively more formal transgovernmental regulatory organizations (TROs). The second type of government network consists of agreements between the domestic regulatory agencies of two or more States. It describes the evolution of a number of the most important transgovernmental regulatory organizations in the global economic and financial arena. It explores the development of less formal bilateral and plurilateral ties, largely between the United States and other countries. It canvasses problems with existing government networks and sketches their implications for the larger project of global governance.

This chapter looks at the rise of the regulatory state in Egypt. It addresses three questions: Why does the Egyptian government delegate its regulatory powers to independent regulators (IRs)? How are these regulatory models diffused in Egypt? And how do IRs work in practice in Egypt? Adopting an institutional framework of analysis, and based on a qualitative in-depth analysis of governmental documents and interviews with decisions-makers and senior regulatory member staff, the chapter investigates the creation and diffusion of IRs in Egypt with special focus on the telecoms sector. The underlying assumption is that the differences at the contextual level between Egypt and the Western European countries where IR models originated may lead to a different rationalization for the creation and diffusion of such a model in Egypt, and the way it works in practice. Examination of the regulatory state in Egypt shows that the creation of the IRs in the telecommunications sector was very much instrumental, meaning that it can be understood on both functional and practical grounds rather than on any other factors of democratic governance or political uncertainties. The findings also highlight the important role of coercive mechanisms in diffusing this regulatory model compared to those of other voluntary mechanisms, such as policy learning and policy transfer. Finally, the chapter shows that IRs can survive and work in divergent environments under authoritarian regimes.

This chapter focuses on the three assaults on regulation, highlighting the efforts in the executive branch to rein-in the regulatory agencies, and in Congress to pass omnibus regulatory reform legislation. The assaults proceeded along many dimensions as the business community's influence infrastructure pressed Congress to repeal or substantially rewrite protective statutes and, failing that, to enact legislation designed to slow down or hamstring the regulatory agencies as they promulgated the regulations needed to implement those statutes. At the same time, they pressed the White House to impose cumbersome procedural and analytical restrictions on executive branch agencies. Headed by political appointees who were unsympathetic to their statutory missions, the agencies abandoned the proactive approaches that they employed during the Public Interest Era and assumed a reactive posture.

This chapter discusses the U.S. and EU regulatory proposals for dealing with the global financial crisis. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act were two of the landmark legislations for overhauling the U.S. regulatory framework. The Dodd Frank proposal sought to address five regulatory issues: (i) the excessive risk taking of financial institutions; (ii) regulatory controls for over-the-counter derivatives and credit default swaps; (iii) the protection of consumers as holders of mortgages and credit cards; (iv) the distribution of regulatory functions among regulatory agencies; and (v) the uniformity and accessibility of global regulatory agencies. In contrast, the regulatory momentum in the EU was slow and dissonant due to the lack of political cohesiveness of nation-states.