Strategies for Success

Abstract

Governments can set up a host of regulatory frameworks. They can pass laws, name and shame, impose taxes, create civil law rights, and so on. They can hand over regulation to independent agencies, and even allow firms to regulate themselves and monitor performance. This chapter looks at strategic choices and the conditions for using different devices successfully. It also reviews the potential of new-style and ‘non-regulatory’ controls such as ‘nudges’. The chapter emphasizes that positive regulation is predisposed to operate by harnessing self-regulatory capacities. Controls within firms, meta-regulatory systems, and schemes of industry self-regulation all provide means of passing the task of front-line control to firms or their associations. These approaches, like collaborative processes, bring a variety of advantages, but there are challenges in deploying such arrangements so as to produce desired results at lowest cost and in a manner that sustains public confidence.