Regulatory Reform as a Normative Concept: an Opportunity for the Development of Constitutive Policies

• Main Author: Ana Petek
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Croatia 2008-01-01
• Series: Anali Hrvatskog Politološkog Društva
• Subjects: regulation; regulatory reform; regulatory impact assessment (RIA); regulatory state; public governance; interpretational framework
• Online Access: http://hrcak.srce.hr/file/55987

Regulatory reform, as part of public sector reform, concerns the change of the way of using regulation as a policy instrument. Since it started for the purpose of facilitating the operation of the business sector through simplifying the regulatory system in order to achieve increased competitiveness in the global market, it still has many opponents criticising its neoliberal background. This paper seeks to show how the regulatory reform programme has “transcended” its primary purpose because its reach has expanded even to noneconomic policy sectors – constitutive policies. Such broader interpretational framework of the objectives of regulatory reform allows access to the regulatory process for a much greater number of actors, particularly for noneconomic interest groups, and the benefits of the regulatory reform programme have spread among the broader ranks of the community. The implication of opening the regulatory process is an opportunity for other value systems, competing with neoliberalism, to affect regulatory reform. The paper especially emphasizes the governance approach to the research on regulatory reform, as the one which can outline and analyse its above-mentioned positive aspects. The essential thesis of the paper is that regulatory reform, as a specific normative concept, if understood within a broader interpretational framework, stimulates the development of constitutive policies in the sense that it places them higher on the policy priority scale of a regulatory state, and that this is exactly what should be the dominant logic of its introduction.