Regulation Way After Delegation: an empirical inquiry from Latin America

After three decades of regulatory reforms in Latin America, the extent of the diffusion of regulatory agencies across the region is well documented. The ongoing challenges concerning stability, credibility and modernization are also largely mapped. Ideas on how to overcome these types of foundational challenges have equally been articulated. However, as previous studies featuring other global regions have already highlighted, including for the Global North, the post-delegation (or post-agencification) phase unveils new developments from the perspective of regulatory agencies. It includes coordination within government and across policy fields, the mobilization, production and provision of regulatory and sectoral evidence and knowledge, new trust and legitimacy challenges and so on. The paper seeks to look into regulatory agencies’ trajectory in Latin America by linking theoretical and empirical inputs to make sense of current regionwide issues as well as relevant particularities that speak to the main post-delegation themes, opportunities and concerns. We will rely on in-depth semi-structured interviews with a set of regulatory agencies from Latin American countries that belong to the OECD Network of Economic Regulators to offer novel conclusions on the present state of the regulatory agency model in nations that share important administrative, political and cultural similarities. The paper contributes to the literature on regulatory policy and diffusion, as well as on comparative public administration by providing new empirical evidence from a region in the Global South that has firmly embraced the regulatory agency model over the last decades.