Regulatory Governance in Turbulent Times

The Section ‘Regulatory Governance in Turbulent Times” brings together Panels and Papers that focus on regulatory governance in a period of both economic and political turbulence. Regulation involves the use of rules – including standard-setting, monitoring and sanctioning – to intervene in the activities of specific categories of economic, political or social actors (e.g., Jordana et al., 2018; Koop and Lodge, 2017). Such interventions may be the initiative of governments and national-level regulatory agencies, but they may also take the form of self-regulation by industry and regulation by international organisations, and transnational regulators (Black, 2017; Drahos, 2017). Yet, in recent years, regulatory governance has faced considerable pressure. Against the backdrop of the rise in economic and political power of big corporations, and the rise in economic inequality, regulators are expected to intervene more in the activities of these corporations. At the same time, regulators’ own performance and role in governing the economy has been questioned. For instance, ‘authoritarian-populist leaders’ (Norris and Inglehart 2019) in various countries have targeted independent regulators (and other independent institutions) with reference to their (perceived) track record in taking decisions that benefit ‘the people’. These developments have led observers and regulators themselves to revisit questions about what role regulators should play, how independent they can and should be, and how they can enhance their legitimacy. This Section seeks to address both empirical and normative questions related to regulatory governance in turbulent times – in particular, questions related to the strategic responses of regulators to the various pressures they face. For instance, what new forms of regulation are used to address the increasingly salient question of global corporate power? Why and how do regulators engage with participatory governance and other more direct modes of involving citizens and what are the implications of such participatory governance? How do regulators engage with – and make use of – their broader regulatory networks when under pressure? How do considerations of morality affect regulatory policy and decisions in a period in which morality politics has become more prominent?