Regulatory Governance: Dynamics Between the Local and the Global

This section is organised by the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance (the steering committee and its chairs) and focuses on the highly dynamic nature of contemporary regulatory governance. Governments and private actors involved in regulation need to respond to fast changing environments, new challenges and risks. These regulatory challenges arise from the augmented complexities of single policy sectors (like regulation of internet, nano-technology, genetic manipulation, financial markets), increasingly colliding sectors (like telecom and media), and cross-cutting wicked policy issues (like climate change, poverty…). However, regulatory dynamics are also caused by the interplay of and power struggles between multiple actors, involved in designing and monitoring hard and soft norms: politicians, sectoral regulatory agencies, competition authorities and other public actors at central and lower government levels, supranational and international bodies, networks of regulators, private self-regulators, regulatees and interest groups, scientific experts and technocrats. Moreover, economic and social regulation become increasingly intertwined and interact with meta-regulation (regulation for better regulation). New regulatory instruments, organisational forms and co-existing mechanisms of regulatory competition and coordination bring about new regulatory governance approaches. All this raises questions about how to frame, describe and explain these dynamics and complexities, about their impact upon the coherence and effectiveness of multi-level regulatory regimes, as well as about their legitimacy, accountability and transparency. This section is open for contributions from different disciplines, including political sciences, international relations and public administration, but also law, economics and others. The section will deal with issues like the coherence of multi-level regulatory regimes; the influence and legitimacy of international norms; the role of trust in regulatory regimes; the organisation and coordination of regulation in multi-level contexts; the governance of better regulation policies; regulating wicked policy issues; role of private actors and interest groups in regulation.