Fasken Visiting Scholar Lecture — “The Essence of Responsive Regulation”

The Essence of Responsive Regulation
A lecture by John Braithwaite
21 September 2010, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Location TBA

Regulation that is responsive to the moves regulated actors make, to industry context and to the environment seems a complex task. Yes, it is complex in the sense that being a parent regulating children, or a child regulating parents, is complex. Yet unsophisticated people can be successful parents and successful children by following some simple heuristics of family regulation.  This presentation seeks to reduce the complexities of responsiveness to a dozen heuristics that state regulators, businesses and NGOs can apply in seeking to regulate one another more successfully. The ideas of pyramids of supports and pyramids of sanctions are at the heart of this project. The lecture argues that partnership with those one intends to regulate is possible in the process of designing regulatory pyramids. The paradox of responsive regulation is that by having a capability to escalate to tough enforcement, most regulation can be about collaborative capacity building. Most of the action can fall within a strengths-based pyramid, a pyramid of supports for business compliance and continuous improvement. The lecture concludes with some comments on how we can know that responsive regulation has worked.