Now showing 1 - 10 of 63
  • Publication
      1061
  • Publication
    Welfare, Regulation and Democracy
    (Social Justice Ireland, 2014-11)
    Changes in the delivery of public services in the industrialised countries over the last forty years have profoundly changed the ways for delivering and thinking about welfare state provision. For some the shift from welfare state to regulatory state indicates that priority is being given to markets and market failure over traditional welfare concerns with redistribution. Such an analysis leads to concerns about a loss of democratic control. For others, the sharpening of public policy institutions and instruments associated with regulatory governance offers the opportunity to deliver public services in a manner which is both more transparent and more efficient, enhancing outcomes, but without deviating from traditional goals. Changes to provision and oversight of welfare state services in Ireland in the past thirty years have included a degree of fragmentation, but also some consolidation, particularly in the health area. The changes in delivery have sustained a long established pattern of providing services through distinct units, both public and private. The changes in regulatory apparatus are more distinctive. In this paper I explore the character and significance of changes in both delivery and regulation and conclude by evaluating these changes from the perspective of democratic governance, identifying risks, but also indicating how fragmented arrangements for delivering and regulating public services may contribute to enhancing democratic engagement.
      250
  • Publication
    Enforcing Consumer Protection Laws
    (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)
    This chapter adopts a broad conception of enforcement so as to support an analysis and comparison of the various different mechanisms through which the entitlements and responsibilities ascribed by consumer laws may be vindicated. I start by evaluating the different agents of enforcement for consumer law. Whilst it is right to consider the full array of different agents of enforcement, including consumers, businesses, public agencies and NGOs, it is inevitable that consumer law enforcement is chiefly associated with public agencies of the kind widely established in the second half of the twentieth century. Considering different styles of enforcement in consumer law the chief focus in this chapter is on public agencies. I conclude by considering the claim that consumer law entered a ‘post-interventionist’ phase in the 1980s and consider the extent to which the implications of this trend for enforcement have been or may be realised.
    Scopus© Citations 7  1129
  • Publication
    Regulating Everything: From Mega- to Meta-regulation
    (Institute of Public Administration, 2012)
    Such is the extent of contemporary regulatory governance that it is possible to characterise the ambition of governments as ‘regulating everything’. This article contrasts the highly visible growth in numbers and scope of regulatory agencies in Ireland, with the more hidden but highly significant diffusion of regulatory capacity which is evident within regulatory regimes. I argue that the concept of the ‘regulatory regime’ is helpful for resisting the tendency to overstate the power and significance of regulatory agencies and to draw in other kinds of actors and other forms of control into our view of governance. I argue that the fragmentation in terms of organisations and forms of control within regulatory regimes creates a problem involving regulatory agencies not of too much power and too little accountability, but rather the converse – too little power and too much accountability. The reconceptualization of regulation which I offer in this article is centrally concerned with questioning an exclusive focus on ‘mega - regulation’ – command and control by regulatory agencies - and offering a way of thinking about regulatory regimes which recognises and works with the diverse capacities for control within them and offering a more ‘meta - regulatory’ image of how the steering capacity of governments might be deployed.
      815
  • Publication
    Integrating Regulatory Governance and Better Regulation as Reflexive Governance
    (Hart Publishing, 2018-05-17)
    Policies of better regulation originate with the Reagan and Thatcher governments whose small government agendas led them to become concerned that there might be a tendency to ratchet up the obligations and costs on businesses associated with regulation with little by way of counterveiling mechanisms to curb the urge to increase regulatory burdens (as they saw it). Whereas early policies on both sides of the Atlantic set down objectives of lifting regulatory burdens and deregulation, the language and ethos changed over time. An early foray for the EU in the 1990s targeted simplification of legislation in the internal market (the SLIM programme) and by the late 1990s the OECD, the EU and many of the OECD States were talking about Better Regulation. The EU programmes was briefly restyled as SMART regulation (2010-14), but soon came back to Better. There is a large body of scholarly and policy work concerned with regulatory governance, conceptualising what it is, and is not, how regulatory norms are made, scrutinising the variety of mechanisms through feedback compliance occurs and seeking to better understand when behavioural correction is likely to be effective (Baldwin, Cave and Lodge 2010; Levi-Faur 2012). The policy and practice fields of Better Regulation, which take as their focus the improved efficiency of regulation, has almost completely passed by the scholarly field of regulatory governance which is concerned with both understanding and enhancing regulatory governance. These two policy and scholarly fields have in common a substantial degree of scepticism concerning the capacity and appropriateness of states to regulate businesses wholly through forms of command, anchored in the enforcement of binding legal rules. The trend in both fields is towards seeking to understand better the limits of command and control regulation and the range of alternative mechanisms of steering behaviour. In this chapter I focus on the big picture trends in better regulation and regulatory governance and propose a way of integrating the policy and public policy fields through elaborating the concept of reflexive governance. A key point of focus for this evaluation is the reforms to better regulation initiated by the Juncker Commission which took office in November 2014 and which were launched in May 2015 (European Commission 2015b).
      357
  • Publication
    The Regulatory State and Beyond
    (ANU Press, 2017)
    In John Braithwaite’s remarkable set of contributions to thinking about and practice of regulation over four decades the state is one of the central organising concepts. This is true for most thinking about regulation more generally, but for a variety of reasons. In Braithwaite’s case the focus on the state may lie with his original interests as a criminologist, where there is a strong consensus that the responsibility for regulating criminal behaviour not only lies with the state, but provides a core rationale for the existence of the state as monopolist over legitimate use of coercive power. Just as that consensus has broken down with the privatization of some aspects of prisons and policing systems in various countries, so the agreement around the centrality of the state in regulation has been challenged. In this chapter I argue that while some, including myself, have seen in Braithwaite’s early, and highly significant research on the role of the state in regulation, a tendency to neglect the wider community and market context, in fact the seeds of a more broadly based analysis of regulatory capitalism may be found throughout Braithwaite’s oeuvre. Policy and scholarly communities were less receptive to understanding the key role of community and market actors set out from an early stage in Braithwaite’s work and more fully developed in his later work. In this chapter I attempt to locate Braithwaite’s major contributions to the theory and practice of the regulatory state and the broader concept of regulatory capitalism within the wider context of contemporary thinking about regulatory governance.
      1183