Towards a Regulatory Governance: the Emergence of More Competent and Convergent Regulatory Agencies in Iran

Following the international trend of the proliferation of regulatory agencies as a central part of modern governance systems, this paper studies the evolution of public sector and the gradual formation of the Iranian regulatory landscape, its main stages, its institutional arrangement, the challenges it has been facing, and the extent that it has improved the performance of the governance system as a whole. As such, the paper explores the period when the main regulatory functions were mainly performed centrally by the ministerial departments, towards a time when several semi-independent regulatory bodies were gradually established in the late 1990s. It then discusses the post-privatization era following the amendment of Article 44 of the Constitution in 2005, characterized by a huge wave of the privatization of state-owned enterprises and a plethora of national acts passed by the Parliament officially proposing the establishment of the National Competition Council and sectoral regulatory authorities. Finally, the paper reviews the recent institutional developments derived from either the emergence of disruptive, mainly digital, technologies or the new legal frameworks facilitating regulatory cooperations and convergence arrangements. Building upon such a contextual analysis, the paper shows that the Iranian regulatory governance has witnessed the rise of a new generation of agencies with expanded competencies in protecting a wide range of socio-political, technical as well as economic public interests. Furthermore the study argues that modern regulators are better-equipped with a divers set of regulatory instruments and are enjoying from a more international recognition. Nevertheless, this paper concludes that the Iranian regulatory governance still lacks the institutionalization of fully independent agencies with a legal framework guaranteeing an appropriate level of regulatory compliance.