Governance landscapes for emerging technologies: The case of cryptocurrencies

Scholars call for “adaptive governance” to balance concern about technology uncertainty with the need for innovation in the governance of emerging technologies. Yet, empirical assessment of such governance systems remains sparse. Do the actors interested in the potential regulation of an emerging technology focus on their own interests and opportunities, or do they think in terms of the collective interest? We focus on the actors who embed such systems from a novel landscape perspective that combines two dimensions of governance: the nature of the regulatory target, and the nature of the process they advocate for governing the target. We present data from over 70 actors in the area of cryptocurrencies for evaluating this new logic.     

Exploring the formal and informal roles of regulatory intermediaries in transnational multistakeholder regulation

Research on regulation and regulatory processes has traditionally focused on two prominent roles: rulemaking and rule‐taking. Recently, the mediating role of third party actors, regulatory intermediaries, has started to be explored – notably in a dedicated special issue of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The present special issue extends this line of research by elaborating the distinction between formal and informal modes of regulatory intermediation, in the specific context of transnational multistakeholder regulation. In this introduction, we identify two key dimensions of intermediation (in)formalism: officialization and formalization. This allows us to develop a typology of intermediation in multistakeholder regulatory processes: formal, interpretive, alternative, and emergent. Leveraging examples from the papers in this special issue, we discuss how these four types of intermediation coexist and evolve over time. Finally, we elaborate on the implications of our typology for regulatory processes and outcomes.     

The Limits of Regulation: Indirect Party Access to State Resources in Australia and the United Kingdom

The way in which political parties use state resources indirectly (e.g., parliamentary expenses) receives substantial attention in public debate, particularly when surrounded by perceptions of misuse. However, scholarly studies of resources indirectly available to parties through their functions in the state, how they are used and regulated, are rare. This article presents an analytical framework that identifies and categorizes the range of indirect resources linked to parties' institutional roles. It locates these resources within a four‐fold matrix of regulation, distinguishing regimes that vary in their detail and whether compliance is externally monitored. Undertaking comparative case studies of parliamentary resource use in the United Kingdom and Australia, we argue that the blurring of party‐political and parliamentary roles can impede the effectiveness of regulatory regimes that democracies adopt, regardless of detail and external enforcement. These findings have important implications for regulatory reforms that seek to constrain parties' behavior to depoliticize democratic governance.     

Counting on codes: An examination of transnational codes as a regulatory governance mechanism for nanotechnologies

This article examines the rise of nanotechnology‐specific codes of conduct (nano‐codes) as a private governance mechanism to manage potential risks and promote the technology. It examines their effectiveness as well as their legitimacy as regulatory instruments in the public domain. The study first maps the rise of voluntary nano‐codes and the roles played by different actors. Focusing on five specific nano‐codes, the article then discusses their adequacy in terms of scientific uncertainty, gaps in existing regulatory regimes, and broader societal concerns. It concludes that these voluntary nano‐codes have weaknesses including a lack of explicit standards on which to base independent monitoring, as well as no sanctions for poor compliance. At the same time it also highlights the potential power of these governance mechanisms under conditions of uncertainty and co‐regulation with government. It is likely that nano‐codes will become the “first cut” of a new governance regime for nanotechnologies.     

Between regulatory field structuring and organizational roles: Intermediation in the field of sustainable urban development

Recent contributions in the domains of governance and regulation elucidate the importance of rule‐intermediation (RI), the role that organizations adopt to bridge actors with regulatory or “rulemaking” roles and those with target or “rule‐taking” roles. Intermediation not only enables the diffusion and translation of regulatory norms, but also allows for the representation of different actors in policymaking arenas. While prior studies have explored the roles that such RIs adopt to facilitate their intermediation functions, we have yet to consider how field‐level structuring processes influence (and are influenced by) the various and changing roles adopted by RI. In this study we focus on the mutually constitutive relations between field‐level change processes and the evolving roles of RIs by studying the rise of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI)/Local Governments for Sustainability, an RI serving as a bridge for sustainable urban development policies between the United Nations and local authorities. Using ICLEI as an illustrative case, we theorize four different processes of regulatory field structuration: problematization, role specialization, marketization, and orchestrated decentralization. We discuss their implications for RI roles in the field and further theorize the changing dynamics of trickle‐up intermediation processes as an RI gains power and influence.     

Measuring multi‐level regulatory governance: Organizational proliferation,coordination, and concentration of influence

As regulation increasingly results from the interplay of a wide array of different actors operating at different levels, it has become crucial to focus on how these constellations of regulatory actors operate. Although this research field presents huge potential for theoretical development, we still lack the measurement techniques to allow systematic comparative research. We contribute to filling this gap with four indices measuring crucial characteristics of multi‐actor regulatory arrangements: (i) the scope of organizational proliferation; (ii) the extent of coordination between regulatory actors; (iii) the amount of influence that each individual regulatory actor has on the sector regulation; and (iv) the extent to which the regulatory influence is concentrated in the hands of one or a few actors. We argue that our indices are sufficiently systematic, reliable, and flexible to be applied in a variety of research contexts relating to multi‐level and multi‐actor regulatory governance.     

Civil society and the regulatory state of the South: A commentary

The basic rationale of the regulatory state is to insulate certain kinds of decisionmaking from political actors. The main purpose of this commentary is to assess the ways that members of civil society, in fact, often shadow and contest the central actors of the regulatory state, even though they are ostensibly well outside it. I offer three distinctions to help broaden and sharpen analysis of the roles and impact of civil society actors: whether civil society actors have special expertise or not; whether the regulatory state is being put in place or already exists; and whether civil society actions are broadly complementary to, or substitutive of, state action. In discussing each of these, I also explore the consequences of the transfer of the regulatory state to the global South, and the way that change in location shapes both the role and impact of civil society and the regulatory state itself.     

Gorillas in the closet? Public and private actors in the enforcement of transnational private regulation

This paper examines to what extent the background presence of state regulatory capacity – at times referred to as the “regulatory gorilla in the closet” – is a necessary precondition for the effective enforcement of transnational private regulation. By drawing on regulatory regimes in the areas of advertising and food safety, it identifies conditions under which (the potential of) public regulatory intervention can bolster the capacity of private actors to enforce transnational private regulation. These involve the overlap between norms, objectives, and interests of public and private regulation; the institutional design of regulatory enforcement; compliance with due process standards; and information management and data sharing. The paper argues that while public intervention remains important for the effective enforcement of transnational private regulation, governmental actors – both national and international – should create the necessary preconditions to strengthen private regulatory enforcement, as it can also enhance their own regulatory capacity, in particular, in transnational contexts.     

Regulatory mobilization and service delivery at the edge of the regulatory state

Where there is weak state capacity to carry out regulatory, redistributional, and developmental functions characterizing much of the developing world, the role of governance and service delivery is also performed by a myriad of private actors. Institutional reform in the utility sector in developing countries has often failed to distinguish between social and economic regulation. I show how private actors like NGOs and local community groups undertake what I term “regulatory mobilization” to influence the new rules of the service delivery game, as well as to deliver much‐needed basic services to urban poor communities. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out in the Philippines, this article reveals and explains the politics of the informal sector at the edge of the regulatory state. More than a decade since the privatization of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System in Metro Manila in 1997, water access for the urban poor remained limited as privatized water utilities faced difficulties in extending service provision. In the context of an unpredictable regulatory landscape and an oligarchic patrimonial state, unexpected collective action by organized urban poor communities and NGOs has taken place around water as a subsistence right. Combining hybrid mobilizations to obtain water as well as influencing the rules governing their provision, these forms of regulatory mobilization appear to be peripheral and episodic. However, depending on how local and sectoral politics are conflated, such regulatory mobilization may sometimes not only result in obtaining subsistence goods, but may also occasionally project countervailing power in the policy sector, and influence formal regulatory frameworks in surprising ways.     

The European regulation of corporate social responsibility: The role of beneficiaries' intermediaries

Intended beneficiaries have an undeniable relevance to regulation. However, current research has focused mainly on the two‐party relationship between rulemaking and rule‐taking. We attempt to fill this gap by exploring the formal and informal roles that beneficiaries’ intermediaries played in co‐creating European Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rules and associated practices between 2000 and 2017. By linking recent conceptualizations of regulatory intermediaries with the literature on critical political CSR, we offer a more dynamic and contextualized understanding of the roles of beneficiaries’ intermediaries. Specifically, we identify six micro‐dynamics through which they influenced the regulatory process. Notably, our findings highlight how the convergence of interests between three groups of beneficiaries’ intermediaries – the Non‐governmental organization–Investor–Union nexus – had a key role in reshaping CSR rules. We conclude that, in the European context, stronger and better‐coordinated beneficiaries’ intermediaries are crucial in order to achieve more effective corporate conduct regulation.     

To enforce or not to enforce? Judicialization,venue shopping,and global regulatory harmonization

The regulation of intellectual property rights takes place in a range of international venues. This proliferation of international venues greatly enhances the potential for venue shopping. We argue that different levels of domestic regulation and differing degrees of judicialization account for actors' preferences over institutional venues. We take into consideration two scenarios. Conceiving of judicialization as the delegation of adjudication to an independent third party and the enforcement through multilaterally authorized sanctions, we show that: (i) upward regulatory harmonization leads actors preferring weak regulatory intellectual property rights standards to strive for venues with low degrees of judicialization, whereas those favoring stringent intellectual property rights protection prefer highly judicialized venues; and (ii) downward harmonization leads to the opposite constellation of institutional preferences. We show how these expectations hold by way of in‐depth case studies of two instances of global intellectual property rights regulation: the regulation of plant genetic resources and intellectual property rights for medicines.     

Community‐Based Organizations and Institutional Work in the Remote Rural West

The institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long‐dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community‐based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California–based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state‐ or industry‐led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions.     

European elections — Iceland

This article considers if an emerging ‘polarised pluralism’ in the German party system explains the recent electoral fortunes of the Party of Democratic Socialism. While it finds that this approach usefully focuses attention on the dynamics of party competition in unified Germany, it nonetheless concludes that the conditions for polarised pluralism are not satisfied in Germany. In place of a ‘polarised pluralism’, this article suggests that a ‘regionalised pluralism’ better explains the rise of the PDS. The key components of regionalised pluralism, its comparative scope and its implications for party politics in Germany are considered.     

Ideological Party Cohesion in Macro‐comparative Politics: The Nordic Social Democratic Parties from a Comparative Perspective

‘Party cohesion’ is a central concept in the analysis of agenda‐setting, veto players and coalition‐building as well as in the analysis of policy efficiency and party responsiveness. However, there is no indicator to measure party cohesion in a systematic manner over time and across parties. As a consequence, most established studies treat political parties as unitary actors although from an analytical point of view they should be considered collective actors. In order to overcome this deficiency, in this article a time‐variant and party‐specific index of party cohesion is developed which can be used in macro‐comparative statistical analysis. The concept of ‘ideological cohesion’ is developed along the Left–Right dimension. This index is applied in order to compare the party cohesion of Nordic social democratic parties (SDs) with their counterparts in 17 additional countries. The results show that the myth of the cohesion of Nordic SDs is only true for the golden age of the welfare state. Currently, most of the Nordic SDs actually have a lower party cohesion than their counterparts in many other countries.     

When doctors shape policy: The impact of self‐regulation on governing human biotechnology

This paper investigates the development and adoption of governance modes in the field of human biotechnology. As the field of human biotechnology is relatively new, voluntary professional self‐regulation constituted the initial governing mode. In the meantime, with the exception of Ireland, all Western European countries have moved toward greater state intervention. Nevertheless, they have done so in contrasting ways and the resulting governance modes for assisted reproductive technology and embryonic stem‐cell research vary greatly. Instead of imposing their steering capacity in a “top‐down” fashion, governments have taken pre‐existing self‐regulatory arrangements in the field into account and built up governance mechanisms in conjunction with private actors and pre‐existing modes of private governance. Our analysis demonstrates that the form and content of the initial self‐regulation explain why the self‐steering capacity of the medical profession was largely or at least partially preserved through hybrid governance systems in Britain and Germany, while in France the self‐regulation was entirely replaced by governmental intervention.     

Preservation actors — past and present a trip through the players: From 1960 to 2000 — and beyond

Abstract

This paper discusses the players in the delivery of low‐income housing from 1960 into the next century. It attempts to analyze characteristic roles for federal, state, local, and private‐sector actors and point to changes in these roles over time.

Activities that are not controversial and not overly expensive will continue; others will fall by the wayside. Unscathed actors, with some redefinition, will continue to survive, while flawed performances will cause some providers of low‐income housing to fail. Eventually, a set of actions and actors capable of promoting sustained housing delivery will emerge. The world will be much different after 2000, however, than it was in the 1960s. Public and private roles will be almost totally reversed, as will be the scale of their activities.     

Regulation and voluntarism: A case study of governance in the making

In this article I analyze a multi‐stakeholder process of environmental regulation. By grounding the article in the literature on regulatory capitalism and governance, I follow the career of a specific legislative process: the enactment of Israel's Deposit Law on Beverage Containers, which aims to delegate the responsibility for recycling to industry. I show that one crucial result of this process was the creation of a non‐profit entity licensed to act as a compliance mechanism. This new entity enabled industry to distance itself from the responsibility of recycling, and thereby frustrated the original objective of the legislation, which was to implement the principle of “extended producer responsibility.” Furthermore, this entity, owned by commercial companies and yet acting as an environmentally friendly organization, allowed industry to promote an anti‐regulatory agenda via a “civic voice.” The study moves methodologically from considering governance as an institutional structure to analyzing the process of “governancing,” through which authoritative capacities and legal responsibilities are distributed among state and non‐state actors. Two key findings are that this process and its outcome (i) are premised on an ideology of civic voluntarism, which ultimately delegates environmental responsibilities to citizens; and (ii) facilitate an anti‐regulatory climate that serves commercial interests.     

The boundary conditions for regulation: Welfare systems,state traditions,and the varied governance of work safety in Europe

Studies of the relationship between the welfare and regulatory state have hitherto either focused on the latter displacing the former, or presented regulation as an alternative means for achieving welfare goals. Little is known, however, about their varied mutual interactions. This article addresses that gap by examining the coevolution of workers' compensation and occupational safety regulation in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Drawing on an extensive international analysis of primary documents, secondary literature, and interviews with regulator, insurance, business, and labor representatives, the article identifies strikingly varied but stable national preferences for: (a) the use of financial versus regulatory instruments and (b) the allocation of regulatory responsibilities between state and nonstate actors. The article presents a novel explanation of that variation as dependent on the relative coherence of interactions between the particular cost‐control logics of welfare provision and wider norms and traditions of state action in each country.     

Regulatory dynamism of environmental mobilization in urban China

In China, urban middle class mobilization against potential pollution risk has become increasingly common. This article examines this phenomenon through a detailed case study of a 2009 anti‐waste incinerator campaign in the Panyu District of Guangzhou, which culminated in a sizeable public protest and government U‐turn. This episode revealed tension between the narrow, state‐centered regulatory model fixated on end‐of‐pipe pollution control, and a much broader decentered approach advocated – and practiced – by project opponents, which incorporated public consultation and much greater emphasis on upstream waste reduction and sorting. In the process, the Panyu campaign progressed beyond a case of “regulation by escalation,” whereby beneficial regulations are belatedly enforced following populist pressure. Instead, it transformed into an open dialogue between a plurality of actors, including citizens, journalists, experts, and officials, about what regulation should constitute and who should determine acceptable levels of risk. By focusing on the processes through which regulatory issues emerged and changed during the Panyu campaign, this article highlights the regulatory dynamism of environmental mobilization in a context of regulatory uncertainty, and campaigns against “locally unwanted land uses” more broadly.     

Judiciaries as crucial actors in Southern regulatory systems: A case study of Indian telecom regulation

This article addresses regulatory reforms in the Indian telecommunications sector and emphasizes the role of the Indian judiciary. Our claim is that when confronted with a series of disputes relating to the nascent telecom regulatory landscape, the Supreme Court of India sought to make a constructive contribution to both the actual disputes as well as the overall regulatory framework. Our reading of these cases suggests that in the sphere of telecom, the Supreme Court has been less interested in stamping its own authority on issues, and has instead sought to bolster the authority and legitimacy of the recently constituted telecom regulatory institutions. We seek to draw attention to the role of the Indian judiciary as marking an exceptional feature of evolving regulatory systems in the Global South. Conventional wisdom in the regulatory jurisprudence that has evolved in the Global North suggests that judiciaries should have little or no role to play in regulatory systems. We suggest that to overcome the special challenges that regulatory systems in the Global South confront, more established institutions and actors might have to lend credibility and legitimacy to enable nascent regulatory actors to develop over time. At least in the Indian case, this is one way to understand the Indian judiciary's interventionist actions in the sphere of telecom regulation.