Toward boundary critique in regulatory governance

Risk and problem identification lies at the heart of regulatory governance, yet how regulators construct the problems they act upon — and where they draw their boundaries — remains undertheorized. This article develops boundary judgments, the socially constructed choices about what falls within a problem and what lies outside it, as a lens for understanding regulatory capacity. Drawing critical systems thinking and the configuration approach together, it argues that the regulatory capture literature explains why problem definitions resist revision but not how they are constructed, and that boundary judgments are produced, reproduced, and fixated through interaction. The features that constitute regulatory agencies — legality, public legitimacy, and independence — tend to hold these definitions in place, so that persistent problems and newly emerging interdependencies appear less as failures of capacity than as boundary judgments hardened beyond question. The article considers how regulators might nonetheless reopen such definitions from within. Keywords: boundary judgments; regulatory governance; critical systems thinking; configuration approach; problem definition