State-led bricolage and the extension of collective governance: Hybridity in the Swiss skill formation system

This paper explores the extension of collective governance to sectors without collective governance tradition. We introduce the concept of state-led bricolage to analyze the expansion of the Swiss apprenticeship training system – in which employer associations fulfill core collective governance tasks – to economic sectors in which training had previously followed a school-based and state-oriented logic. In deindustrializing societies, these sectors are key for the survival of collectively governed training systems. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we examine the reform process that led to the creation of new intermediary organizations that enable collective governance in these sectors. In addition, we compare the organizational features of these organizations with the respective organizations in the traditional crafts and industry sectors. We find that the new organizations result from state-led bricolage. They are hybrid organizations that reflect some of the bricoleur's core policy goals and critically build on the combination of associational and state-oriented institutional logics.     

Business interests in salmon aquaculture certification: Competition or collective action?

Research recognizes that strategic business interests can provide an important driver of private regulation, even in the absence of significant societal pressure and non‐governmental organization‐constructed demand. This article examines a range of competition and collective action‐related interests that can motivate firms to promote and adopt certification schemes. We pay particular attention to the hitherto underexplored collective action interest to safeguard common‐pool resources, upon which an industry may depend to sustain yields. Based on a case study of salmon aquaculture certification, the article argues that while the corporate motives repertoire includes strengthening competitiveness and industry reputation, safeguarding shared waters for culturing salmon is key to explaining industry commitment to and adoption of private regulation in this sector.     

Limits to non‐state market regulation: A qualitative comparative analysis of the international sport footwear industry and the Fair Labor Association

Non‐state market regulation has become a central focus and continues to receive scholarly attention. The present paper provides an assessment of the conditions under which multinational firms join a multi‐stakeholder certification initiative. The cases of the Fair labor Association and 17 international sport footwear companies have been selected for this purpose. A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of the 17 cases is performed. The paper argues that the combination of sustained NGO pressure and public ownership of a firm is a necessary precondition for firms joining a multi‐stakeholder certification initiative. The theoretical and policy implications of this result are discussed.     

Role perceptions and attitudes toward discretion at a decentralized regulatory frontline: The case of organic inspectors

The complexity of decentralized regulatory contexts can threaten program fidelity, particularly if it results in divergence between program goals and the intents of regulatory inspectors. This paper investigates how inspectors negotiate the conflicting demands of a decentralized program by examining how they perceive their regulatory roles – the primary responsibilities that inspectors ascribe to their functions and the entities to which they feel responsible – and how these role orientations are related to inspectors' attitudes toward the use of discretion. The study findings indicate that in the decentralized administration of United States organic food regulations, inspectors experience multiple, and sometimes conflicting, role orientations. The presence of multiple role orientations, however, does not seem to affect how inspectors approach their responsibilities. The combined strengths of quantitative and qualitative data are leveraged to offer explanations for the study findings and identify avenues for future research.     

The paradox of collective action: Linking interest aggregation and interest articulation in EU legislative lobbying

Olson's logic of collective action predicts that business interest associations face fewer collective action problems than citizen action groups. This article challenges this assumption by arguing that forming an organization comes with different collective action problems than voicing a joint policy position. This leads us to examine an important paradox: Citizen groups face challenges in establishing themselves as organizations but find it relatively easy to position themselves on policy issues, whereas the reverse is true for business associations. We study this paradox empirically based on interviews with spokespersons of interest organizations active in the European Union and find support for our hypotheses. Our findings demonstrate that citizen groups position themselves on policy issues more easily than business interests and that this competitive advantage is amplified when policy issues attract the attention of the media.     

LONG TERM CARE REGULATION IN THE STATES: A SYSTEMIC PERSPECTIVE

In recent years there has been growing interest in differing state roles in the regulation of the health care industry. Most of this attention has stressed the impact of regulatory policy with only superficial attention directed towards understanding the extent to which states can be counted on to act effectively in the area of health care regulation. Using the regulation of nursing homes as a focus, this study evaluates a variety of sociocultural, political, and economic conditions for their impact on the development of various regulatory policies. The findings suggest that the development of certificate of need legislation and reimbursement controls were not related to significant changes ir, states' budgets for Medicaid services or in bed/population ratios. Instead, regulatory efforts were more closely linked to the sociopolitical environments surrounding the policy arena. While these factors provide some indication of the potential for strong state action in the regulatory arena, ultimately the use of state regulatory policies will depend quite centrally on the innovative tendencies of the state, its organizational capacity for addressing policy issues, and the nature and extent of interest group politics.     

Intermediary roles in regulatory programs: Toward a role‐based framework

This paper develops a role‐based framework of intermediaries in regulatory programs. In examining the types of roles that organizations adopt in regulation and governance, we argue that roles have important implications for understanding organizational and program level dynamism and outcomes. We use the Regulator–Intermediary–rule‐Taker framework to describe how organizational roles can be adopted through assignment, appropriation, or promotion. We then go deeper into how intermediaries adopt a variety of different roles in key regulatory programs. We examine generic intermediary roles across programs that involve four main groups of activities: creating and/or organizing, coordinating between programs, supporting implementation, and voicing an opinion. All in all, our role‐based framework allows for a novel relational way to understand interorganizational and institutional dynamism in complex, interactive, and ever‐changing regulatory regimes.     

Professional associations and the free rider problem: The case of optometry

Political influence by a professional association, like the influence of any special interest group, is a collective good for the members of the profession. This paper investigates the variables affecting the ability of state optometric associations to overcome the free rider problem and induce optometrists to join the association. Although the empirical results show little evidence that organization costs are reduced by concentration in urban areas, the results do strongly support the hypothesis that there will be less free riding in smaller groups. The results also support the hypothesis that selective incentives enable latent groups to overcome the free rider problem. By providing continuing education at reduced fees to members of the association, optometric associations have increased the percentage of optometrists who are association members in those states with statutory continuing education requirements.     

Experimentalist interactions: Joining up the transnational timber legality regime

This paper analyzes the interactions between the separate components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, both public and private. It examines how far, and through what institutional mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joined-up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The paper argues that the experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has fostered productive, mutually reinforcing interactions both with public timber legality regulation in other consumer countries and with private certification schemes. But this emerging regime remains highly polyarchic, with broad scope for autonomous initiatives by NGOs and private service providers, along with national governments, international organizations, and multi-donor partnerships. Hence horizontal integration and coordination within it depend on a series of institutional mechanisms, some of which are distinctively experimentalist, while others can also be found in more conventional regimes. These mechanisms include cross-referencing and reciprocal endorsement of rules and standards; recursive learning through information pooling and peer review of implementation experience; public oversight and joint assessment of private certification and legality verification schemes; and the “penalty default” effect of public legality regulation in consumer countries, which have pushed both exporting countries and transnational firms to comply with the norms and procedures of the emerging transnational regime. The paper's findings thus provide robust new evidence for the claim advanced in previous work that a joined-up transnational regime can be assembled piece by piece under polyarchic conditions through coordinated learning from decentralized experimentation, without a hegemonic power to impose common global rules.     

Pharmaceutical regulation in Denmark and the UK: Reformulating interest representation to the transnational level

Abstract. Common elements are recognised across Denmark and the UK in regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, which are attributed to the impact of associational action at the sector level. Our examination of arrangements for regulating medicine prices and information displays many of the hallmarks of neo-corporatism – namely negotiation with state agencies, compliance seeking among members, and policy implementation through acting as a Private Interest Government. During a period of economic internationalisation and directive international agencies, we show how business interests have reformulated to transnational levels, with associations, despite facing a greater complexity of interests to represent, having a strong impact upon regulatory outcomes. These have been neither wholly deregulatory or reregulatory, but partly reflect events at national levels. This may predict regulatory developments at the European level in other sectors.     

The Brazilian Association of Regulatory Agencies: Integrating levels,consolidating identities in the regulatory state in the south

This article discusses a unique organization in the regulatory world, the Brazilian Association of Regulatory Agencies (ABAR), which brings together federal, state, and municipal regulatory agencies across different policy sectors. The paper argues that as a regulatory policy network, ABAR has been crucial to the professional socialization, capacity building, and institutionalization of regulators in Brazil. Moreover, it has promoted their identity as professionals and differentiated them from politicians, regulatees, and societal actors. Thus, while ABAR raises the shield of expertise to secure independence from political and social interference, it has itself become a relevant actor in the country's regulatory political dynamics, contributing as such to the strengthening of the Brazilian regulatory state.     

Growing exports by signaling product quality: Trade competition and the cross‐national diffusion of ISO 9000 quality standards

Trade policy is an important topic in global public policy. It is recognized that trade is hampered when buyers have incomplete information about the offered products, a problem accentuated in the international markets by the physical and cultural distances between buyers and sellers. Buyers look for proxies to assess product quality, and exporters that can provide assurance about quality gain a competitive advantage. Our paper focuses on voluntary or private regulatory programs that have emerged as important instruments to correct policy failures. We examine how trade competition motivates firms to signal quality by joining ISO 9000, the most widely adopted voluntary quality certification program in the world. Methodologically, our study is novel because we observe trade competition at the bilateral and the sectoral levels. Structural equivalence, the measure of competition we introduce in this paper, captures competitive threats posed by actors that export similar products to the same overseas markets. We study ISO 9000 adoption levels from 1993 to 2002 for 134 countries, and separately for non‐OECD countries and non‐EU countries. Across a variety of specifications, we find that trade competition drives ISO adoption: The uptake of ISO 9000 is encouraged by ISO 9000 adoption by firms located in countries that are “structurally equivalent” trade competitors. Given that information problems about product quality are likely to be more salient for developing country exporters, we find that trade competition offers a stronger motivation for ISO 9000 adoption in non‐OECD countries in relation to developed countries. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The effectiveness of NGO self‐regulation: theory and evidence from Africa

Non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) play an increasingly important role in public service provision and policy making in sub‐Saharan Africa, stimulating demand for new forms of regulatory oversight. In response, a number of initiatives in NGO self‐regulation have emerged. Using cross‐national data on 20 African countries, the article shows that self‐regulation in Africa falls into three types: national‐level guilds, NGO‐led clubs and voluntary codes of conduct. Each displays significant weaknesses from a regulatory policy perspective. National guilds have a broad scope, but require high administrative oversight capacity on the part of NGOs. Voluntary clubs have stronger standards but typically have much weaker coverage. Voluntary codes are the most common form of self‐regulation, but have the weakest regulatory strength. This article argues that the weakness of current attempts to improve the accountability and regulatory environment of NGOs stems in part from a mismatch between the goals of regulation and the institutional incentives embedded in the structure of most self‐regulatory regimes. The article uses the logic of collective action to illustrate the nature of this mismatch and the tradeoffs between the potential breadth and strength of various forms of NGO self‐regulation using three detailed case studies. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When Government Subsidizes Its Own: Collective Bargaining Laws as Agents of Political Mobilization

Government policies can activate a political constituency not only by providing material resources to, or altering the interpretive experiences of, individual citizens, but also by directly subsidizing established interest groups. We argue that state laws mandating collective bargaining for public employees provided organizational subsidies to public sector labor unions that lowered the costs of mobilizing their members to political action. Exploiting variation in the timing of laws across the states and using data on the political participation of public school teachers from 1956 to 2004, we find that the enactment of a mandatory bargaining law significantly boosted subsequent political participation among teachers. We also identify increased contact from organized groups seeking to mobilize teachers as a likely mechanism that explains this finding. These results have important implications for the current debate over collective bargaining rights and for our understanding of policy feedback, political parties and interest groups, and the bureaucracy.     

Self-Regulatory Trajectories in the Shadow of Public Power: Resolving Digital Dilemmas in Europe and the United States

Although industry self-regulation has developed into a preferred regulatory strategy for the digital economy, self-regulatory solutions adopted in the U.S. and the European Union differ considerably. We argue that variation in the shadow of public power—the public sector tools employed to induce industry collective action—sets the two on distinct self-regulatory trajectories. Legalistic self-regulation dominates in the U.S. and coordinated self-regulation in Europe. Expectations derived from the model are evaluated in case studies of online content regulation and personal data privacy protection.     

National styles of regulation: Child care in three countries

An analysis of child care regulations in Germany, Sweden, and the United States reveals distinctive national policy styles. A ‘social constructionist’ perspective, with its emphasis on variable problem definitions, helps to explain such differences. However, a full understanding of regulatory differences requires attention to regulatory solutions as well. By disaggregating the concept of regulation, we are able to demonstrate rather different rank-orderings of our three countries in their regulatory solutions. We attribute these differences to cultural, institutional, and political characteristics of the three countries.     

The Role of Policy Brokers: The Case of Biotechnology in Kenya

Debates about biotechnology continue to be polarized despite its potential to improve the living standards of the poor in Sub‐Saharan Africa. In the backdrop of this polarized scenario, this paper asked, is there a place for brokers in bringing about a productive debate that is pro‐development? The paper argued that if potential intermediaries are analyzed from the perspective of understanding their role and stakeholding in the regulatory change process, this may help breakout the current polarized anti‐ and pro‐biotechnology debates and thereby focus on how to enable productive biotechnology development. Informed by insights from innovation brokering, the functions of brokers in biotechnology regulation are analyzed through the lens of organizations involved in agricultural biotechnology debates in Kenya. The analysis found that policy brokering function attracts varying opportunities and challenges appropriate for informing relevant policy. The paper drew lessons from Kenya's experience to inform a productive policy brokering model for biotechnology regulation.     

The Centralization/Decentralization Paradox in Civil Service Reform: How Government Structure Affects Democratic Training of Civil Servants

We hypothesize that the structural characteristics (i.e., centralization versus decentralization) of government affect the availability of training in values and skills that are fundamental to democratization. We test our hypothesis in statistical models predicting anticorruption training and policy skills training, using a model of technical skills training for comparison. We find that centralized government structure significantly increases the odds of receiving both anticorruption training and policy skills training. In contrast, we find no statistical correlation between government structure and receipt of technical skills training. In light of these empirical results, we describe a theoretical paradox in civil service reform associated with democratization: While the end goal of such reform is decentralized government with local services and a professionalized civil service, reform itself may best supported by a centralized environment to achieve the democratic value and skills training needed to support transition to democracy.     

Policy and regulatory design for developing countries: a mechanism design and transaction cost approach

The first-generation literature on policy design has made considerable contributions over the last 30 years to our understanding of the process, politics and implications of policy design and instrument choice. This literature, however, has generally treated institutions as a black box and has not developed a coherent set of frameworks, theories and models of how institutions matter to policy design. In this paper, I unpack the black box of institutions using transaction cost and mechanism design to show how regulations can be better designed in developing countries when institutions are weak, unaccountable, corrupted or not credible. Under these conditions, I show that efficient regulatory design has to minimize transaction costs, particularly agency problems, by having incentive compatible (self-enforcing) mechanisms. I conclude with a second-generation research agenda on regulatory design with implications for environmental, food and drug safety, healthcare and financial regulation in developing countries.     

Judicious Incentives: International Public Policy Responses to the Globalization of Environmental Management

Public policymakers and regulators worldwide are grappling with the desire to improve environmental quality through appropriate regulation of business, while also streamlining government. Concurrently, environmentally conscience consumers are calling for improved environmental performance by industry. As a result of these pressures, regulators and lawmakers worldwide are attempting to craft effective policies that create adequate incentives for environmental protection on the part of firms, in the face of decreasing budgets and an increased demand for the use of market‐based incentives. To aid decision makers as they struggle with these concerns, this study provides a detailed case examination of the dilemmas and responses of national‐level regulators as they try to develop appropriate responses to the rise of international and “voluntary” management regimes. To accomplish these goals, this article compares the public policy responses of governments around the world to one such voluntary international environmental regime: ISO 14001. ISO 14001 is a form of industry self‐regulation in response to market forces calling for harmonization in environmental management and as a result of consumer and trade‐partner demands. This study examines the relationships between regulators and the regulated in order to understand if ISO 14001 certified firms are receiving regulatory relief or other forms of public policy/regulatory benefits as a result of their certification. It will also examine the impact that government incentives (or their absence) are having on the certification decisions of firms around the world. This information helps us to begin to understand how the trends toward smaller government and voluntary environmental regimes are affecting one another.