Adversarialism versus legalism: Juridification and litigation in corporate governance reform

Recent reforms of corporate governance law and related litigation rules in the US and in Germany indicate that reports of the spread of adversarial legalism are greatly exaggerated. Politics and legislation in the US since the mid‐1990s have turned quite decisively against shareholder litigation even as corporate governance and securities law reforms have expanded the role and scope of the regulatory state. Germany's extraordinary expansion of financial and corporate governance regulation since the early 1990s exemplifies juridification. Although these reforms included some liberalization of shareholder litigation rules, the changes reflected skepticism towards private litigation and imposed new constraints on the most prevalent forms of shareholder suits. Marketization of economic relations and the era of finance capitalism have produced far more legalism than adversarialism, more regulation than judicialization, and more ex ante transparency rules than ex post litigation remedies.     

The logic of China country ＂tax-for-fee reform＂ in politics and governance perspective

This article exercises theoretical analysis tax-for-fee reform in politics and governance perspective method and attempts to understand the logic of country in China. The article considers that it presents two kinds of very differences phenomena in politics and governance angle of view on China country ＂tax-for-fee reform＂. The reform has basically improved state-peasant tension relationship and enhanced political validity in political angle of view. But absenting on method and shrinking on resources of governance, town-village organization reduced supplies on public service and public goods, new governance crisis formed. If politics and governance deviate for a long time, political validity has the possibility to glide away because of new governance crisis.     

Regulatory reform and governance: A survey of selected developing and transition economies

Regulation is now considered an integral instrument in developing policy toolkit to support market‐led, pro‐poor growth in developing and transition economies. Institutional environment in general and regulatory governance in particular have increasingly been viewed as a factor of competitiveness. In search for better governance, regulatory reform is critical. This article assesses regulatory reform in selected developing and transition economies by reporting the results of a survey on the application of regulatory governance policies, tools and institutions. It is found that in these countries regulatory reform has not shifted in approaches and objectives to taking a systematic view of regulatory governance and the means of promoting and enhancing it. It is suggested that, in order to improve regulatory governance, focus should be put on each of the three elements: regulatory policies, tools and institutions, and that centralised and concerted efforts are needed to integrate the elements. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Risk and the limits of governance: Exploring varied patterns of risk‐based governance across Europe

Risk‐based approaches to governance are widely promoted as universally applicable foundations for improving the quality, efficiency, and rationality of governance across policy domains. Premised on the idea that governance cannot eliminate all adverse outcomes, these approaches provide a method for establishing priorities and allocating scarce resources, and, in so doing, rationalise the limits of what governance interventions can, and should, achieve. Yet cursory observation suggests that risk‐based approaches have spread unevenly across countries. Based on a comparison of the UK, France, and Germany, this article explores the ways in which, and why, such approaches have “colonised” governance regimes in the UK, but have had much more limited application in France and Germany. We argue that the institutionally patterned adoption of risk‐based governance across these three countries is related to how entrenched governance norms and accountability structures within their national polities handle both the identification and acceptance of adverse governance outcomes.     

Post‐crisis reforms in banking: Regulators at the interface between domestic and international governance

Post‐crisis international standards have been agreed on in certain areas of banking regulation, namely capital, liquidity, and resolution, but not others, namely bank structure – why? We articulate a two‐step analytical framework that links the domestic and international levels of governance. In particular, we focus on the role of domestic regulators at the interface between the two levels. At the domestic level, regulators evaluate externalities and adjustment costs before engaging in cooperation at the international level. This analysis explains why regulators in the United States and the European Union act as pacesetters, foot‐draggers, or fence‐sitters in international standard setting; that is to say, why they promote, resist, or are neutral toward international financial standards. At the international level, we explain the outcome of international standard setting by considering the interaction of pacesetters and foot‐draggers.     

From support to pressure: The dynamics of social and governmental influences on environmental law enforcement in Guangzhou City,China

This paper examines how changes in governmental and social influences affect environmental enforcement in Guangzhou city, China, between 2000 and 2006. The paper finds that a form of “decentered regulation” has developed. Regulatory enforcement is no longer the sole affair of the government and the regulatory bureaucracy, but has been increasingly influenced by societal forces. The transformation over time shows the promises and limits of decentered regulation in Guangzhou's dynamic authoritarian setting. Analyzing a set of longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews, the paper finds that by 2006, the rise of civil society and its increased support for protecting the environment had a double‐edged impact on the enforcement of environmental regulations. The paper demonstrates that on the one hand, by 2006, when government support for enforcement was low, societal forces developed an ability to counterbalance such lack of governmental support and positively influence enforcement. However, it also shows that when government support was high, a concurrent rise in societal support created a negative effect on enforcement. Thus too much societal support can become an enforcement burden.     

The Nordic governments' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic: A comparative study of variation in governance arrangements and regulatory instruments

Government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in the Nordic states—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—exhibit similarities and differences. This article investigates the extent to which crisis policymaking diverges from normal policymaking within the Nordic countries and whether variations between the countries are associated with the role of expertise and the level of politicization. Government responses are analyzed in terms of governance arrangements and regulatory instruments. Findings demonstrate some deviation from normal policymaking within and considerable variation between the Nordic countries, as Denmark, Finland, and to some extent Norway exhibit similar patterns with hierarchical command and control governance arrangements, while Iceland, in some instances, resembles the case of Sweden, which has made use of network-based governance. The article shows that the higher the influence of experts, the more likely it is that the governance arrangement will be network-based.     

The unstable core of global finance: Contingent valuation and governance of international accounting standards

Accounting standards are the foundations of the financial regulatory edifice, and global financial governance is no more stable than the asset valuations that feed it. Yet for two decades and up to this day, no international accounting rule for financial instruments – the bulk of banks' balance sheets – has emerged that was more than a temporary fix, to be succeeded by further reforms. We show how banking regulators have been central to this dynamic and how their support for applying fair value accounting to financial instruments, the cornerstone of regulatory debate, has oscillated throughout the whole period. The two common international political economy approaches to global financial governance, which analyze it either as interest‐based bargaining or as ideas‐driven expert governance, fail to account for this pattern. In contrast, we show how the contingency of financial valuations itself has made it impossible for regulators to embrace or reject a stable set of accounting rules.     

Balancing experimentalist and hierarchical governance in European Union electricity and telecommunications regulation: A matter of degrees

While the widespread diffusion of experimentalism across sectors and polities is well documented, less is known about the extent of the shift to this non‐hierarchical form of governance, which continues to coexist with traditional hierarchical governance and involves more inclusive rulemaking and revision based on review of alternative implementation experiences. By comparing and process‐tracing electricity and telecommunications regulation in the European Union, we find diversity in experimentalism over time and across two sectors often considered similar. We explain varying degrees of experimentalism with strategic uncertainty and the constellation of preferences, which we label “de facto polyarchy.” Thus, we confirm the emphasis on uncertainty documented in the experimentalist literature, while addressing a conventional critique by also highlighting the relevance of “politics.” Moreover, while corroborating the common spread of experimentalism, we suggest that an analytical framework based on ideal types offers the best route forward to develop comparative analysis of experimentalism and non‐hierarchical forms of governance more broadly.     

Making sense of multilevel governance and governance coordination in Brazil: The case of the Bolsa Verde Programme

Brazil is an example of a challenging governance context par excellence: continental size, multi-levelled governance structures and diverse administrative cultures meet with ambitious, large-scale policy needs and objectives. The multilevel governance approach is applied here to analyse implementation and governance coordination of the Bolsa Verde Programme (BVP). Through a close reading of the narratives told by three programme officials – and zooming in on jointly exercised governance functions known from the metagovernance approach – we analysed how BVP’s programmatic governance coordination was made sense of. The analysis showed that our interviewees were well aware of the shortcomings of the governance coordination in BVP, understood as rather hierarchical, centrally driven and often tackling challenges of vertical multi-actor coordination in a reactive ad-hoc manner. However, since the implementers have been able to creatively and skilfully solve governance coordination challenges, possibilities for developing more systematic and inclusive (meta)governance approaches seem feasible.     

The challenge of accountability in complex regulatory networks: The case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

A puzzle that faces public administrators within regulatory governance networks is how to balance the need for democratic accountability while increasingly facing demands from elected officials to optimize oversight of industry by utilizing the expertise of the private sector in developing risk‐based standards for compliance. The shift from traditional command and control oversight to process oriented regulatory regimes has been most pronounced in highly complex industries, such as aviation and deepwater oil drilling, where the intricate and technical nature of operations necessitates risk‐based regulatory networks based largely on voluntary compliance with mutually agreed upon standards. The question addressed in this paper is how the shift to process oriented regimes affects the trade‐offs between democratic, market, and administrative accountability frames, and what factors determine the dominant accountability frame within the network. Using post‐incident document analysis, this paper provides a case study of regulatory oversight of the deepwater oil drilling industry prior to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, to explore how the shift to a more networked risk‐based regulatory regime affects the trade‐offs and dominant accountability frames within the network. The results of this study indicate that a reliance on market‐based accountability mechanisms, along with the lack of a fully implemented process‐oriented regulatory regime, led to the largest oil spill in US history.     

A theory of risk colonization: The spiralling regulatory logics of societal and institutional risk

Abstract

Explanations of the growing importance of risk to regulation identify three processes; the need to respond to newly created and discovered risks; the growth of regulatory frameworks; and the use of the risk instrument as an organizing idea for decision-making in modernity. Synthesizing these explanations, we propose a theory of risk colonization. We introduce a distinction between societal and institutional risks, the former referring to threats to members of society and their environment, and the latter referring to threats to regulatory organizations and/or the legitimacy of rules and methods of regulation. We argue that pressures towards greater coherence, transparency, and accountability of the regulation of societal risks can create institutional risks by exposing the inevitable limitations of regulation. In the first stage of risk colonization, framing the objects of regulation as ‘risks’ serves as a useful instrument for reflexively managing the associated institutional threats. This can be followed, in a second stage, by a dynamic tension between the management of societal and institutional risks that results in spiralling feedback loops. The very process of regulating societal risks gives rise to institutional risks, the management of which sensitizes regulators to take account of societal risks in different ways. We discuss links between this theory and the concept of governmentality and conclude with some speculations about the possible positive and negative consequences of risk colonization.     

Power transitions and the rise of the regulatory state: Global market governance in flux

This special issue examines the consequences of the ongoing power transition in the world economy for global regulatory regimes, especially the variation in rising powers' transition from rule-takers to rule-makers in global markets. This introductory article presents the analytical framework for better understanding those consequences, the Power Transition Theory of Global Economic Governance (PTT-GEG), which extends the scope of traditional power transition theory to conflict and cooperation in the international political economy and global regulatory governance. PTT-GEG emphasizes variation in the institutional strength of the regulatory state as the key conduit through which the growing market size of the emergent economies gives their governments leverage in global regulatory regimes. Whether or not a particular rising power, for a particular regulatory issue, invests its resources in building a strong regulatory state, however, is a political choice, requiring an analysis of the interplay of domestic and international politics that fuels or inhibits the creation of regulatory capacity and capability. PTT-GEG further emphasizes variation in the extent to which rising powers' substantive, policy-specific preferences diverge from the established powers' preferences as enshrined in the regulatory status quo. Divergence should not be assumed as given. Distinct combinations of these two variables yield, for each regulatory regime, distinct theoretical expectations about how the power transition in the world economy will affect global economic governance, helping us identify the conditions under which rule-takers will become regime-transforming rule-makers, regime-undermining rule-breakers, resentful rule-fakers, or regime-strengthening rule-promoters, as well as the conditions under which they remain weakly regime-supporting rule-takers.     

Deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance: a case study of one deliberative experimental in China

Deliberative democracy requires a new type of deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance. However, there has been little examination of the connection between deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance. Moreover, despite a growing literature that has examined a diversity of concepts of Chinese citizenship, the newly emerging deliberative citizenship has not been studied. This paper attempts to fill these two gaps by studying the role of deliberative citizenship in deliberative governance practice. Drawing on an experiment this author organized in 2010, this article examines the question of whether deliberative citizenship can be harnessed to solve a particular social problem and how deliberative forums can become a new form of deliberative governance mechanism. It examines what kind of conditions help or hinder the development of deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance, and identifies the limitations of local deliberative democracy in China.     

Power transitions and global trade governance: The impact of a rising China on the export credit regime

The existing liberal international economic order was constructed during the era of American hegemony and has been heavily shaped by US power. How is the rise of China affecting global economic governance? This article analyzes the case of export credit, which has long been considered a highly effective international regulatory regime and an important component of global trade governance. I show that the rise of China is profoundly altering the landscape of export credit and undermining its governance arrangements. State-backed export credit is a key tool of China's development strategy, yet I argue that an explosion in China's use of export credit is eroding the efficacy of existing international rules intended to prevent a competitive spiral of state subsidization via export credit. The case of export credit highlights a fundamental tension between liberal institutions of global governance and the development objectives of emerging powers.     

Global governance of training standards in an outsourced labor force: The training double bind in seafarer license and certification assessments

The shipping industry is among the most globalized of all industries and is characterized by complex modular supply chains, including a largely outsourced labor force of “just‐in‐time” casualized workers from developing countries and the transitional East European states. Despite long‐standing efforts by international bodies to standardize and regulate the education and training of seafarers, variations in practices and standards persist. Employers exercise contradictory influences on education and training providers, on the one hand demanding the urgent provision of more recruits (encouraging corner‐cutting), and on the other complaining about the poor quality of recruits received (urging crackdowns on poor quality providers and more rigorous examinations) – the training double bind. This paper reflects on these issues through the study of the problematic use of computerized assessments in seafarer examinations, drawing upon findings from a study involving research in six different case study countries providing maritime labor and interviews with stakeholders.     

改革开放的时空格局——国家治理体系和治理能力现代化视域下的分析

改革开放40余年,我国发展取得全方位历史性成就。在国家治理体系和治理能力现代化视域下,立足时代背景的变幻、主要矛盾的变化、经济制度的变迁及总体目标的嬗变等维度,审视当前改革开放所处的时空格局。“以扩大开放促进深化改革,以深化改革促进扩大开放”,是对改革开放以来两个不同时期的科学判断,为今后面对扩大开放所遇到的前所未有的复杂局面和艰巨任务、如何发挥好改革的突破和先导作用、依靠改革应对变局与开拓新局,提供了根本的发展理路。     

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 limits and variety of risk‐based governance: The case of flood management in Germany and England

Risk‐based governance is argued by many to hold the promise of a more rational and efficient state, by making explicit the limitations of state interventions and focusing finite resources on those targets where probable damage is greatest. This paper challenges the assumption that risk‐based governance has the potential for universal and uniform application, by comparing contemporary flood management in Germany and England. On first inspection, flooding appears to be a paradigmatic case of risk colonizing European policy discourses, with the traditional notion of flood defense giving way to flood risk management in the context of climate change, increasingly frequent flood disasters, political and cost pressures on flood protection, and publicly available European‐wide flood assessments. Drawing on in‐depth empirical research, this paper shows how the role, and even the definition, of “risk” is institutionally shaped, and how the respective institutional environments of German and English flood management practices impede and promote risk colonization. In particular, the use and conceptualizations of risk in governance are variously promoted, filtered, or constrained by the administrative procedures, structures, and political expectations embedded within flood management and wider polities of each country. The findings of this research are important for the design and implementation of supranational policies and regulations that endorse risk‐based approaches, such as the recent EU Flood Directive, as well as scholarly debate as to how to legitimately define the limits of governance in the face of uncertainty and accountability pressures.     

解构与重构：行业协会商会脱钩改革的政会关系变迁研究

作为中国现代社会组织体制改革的突破口,行业协会商会与行政机关脱钩改革从试点进入到全面推开阶段。考察脱钩改革的历史变迁,“去行政化”的核心目标和“推行政会分开”的改革方式一以贯之,政府对行业协会商会既培育发展又规范管理、秩序优先于活力的价值排序,构成中国行业协会商会管理体制改革的逻辑起点。脱钩改革带动政会关系从“行政主导”的解构转向“政治领导与合作共治并进”的重构,为此,需要从政治领导关系和合作共治关系两方面对构建适应于后脱钩时代的新型治理制度框架和整合机制提出完善建议。