Miranda Forsyth is a Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet at Australian National Uuniversity (Canberra).

Miranda Forsyth, How can harmful practices related to beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery be regulated?, Tuesday 28 March 2024, 11.00 CET; 12.00 Jerusalem; 20.00 AEDT.

For most people in the Global North, such a question might seem of esoteric interest at best.  However, there are two levels of reasons why the topic should be of broad interest.  First, in fact violence and stigmatisation related to these beliefs is a significant and extreme form of human rights abuse in many countries across the globe today, as acknowledged in 2021 in the recent UN Human Rights Declaration on the topic.  Further, this abuse is not just occurring in the Global South.  For example, in the U.K., where these cases have started to be officially recognised, authorities document thousands of cases of child abuse linked to belief in witchcraft each year.  It is a form of abuse that has been routinely overlooked by authorities across the world, leaving the work of protecting the vulnerable, and caring for survivors, to community leaders, tiny NGOs, and caring friends and neighbours. The second reason the issue should be of broad interest is a conceptual one.  This is because regulation in this requires engagement with what I term “worldview pluralism” in ways that may also be relevant for issues such as scapegoating, misinformation, conspiracy thinking and extremism.

Wim Huisman is a Professor of Criminology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and head of the VU School of Criminology.

Susanne Karstedt is a Professor of Criminology at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Australia.

Webinar Series on “Injustice and Redress” and “Theories of Regulation and Governance”, hosted by David Levi-Faur

Wim Huisman & Susanne Karstedt, Patterns and Trends of Organizational Characteristics of Corporate involvement in Atrocity Crimes, Wednesday, March 20^th 2024, 12.00 CET; 13.00 Jerusalem; 22.00 Australia (AEDT).

Since WWII, numerous corporations have been involved in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This has raised major concern worldwide, and started a proliferation of hard and soft law instruments that require corporations to conduct human rights due diligence and to prevent becoming involved in the most serious human rights abuses.  What are the risks for corporations that are related to their operations?  Which corporate characteristics are conducive to corporations’ engagement in situations of instability, conflict and war where they are at risk of becoming involved in atrocity crimes?

In this contribution we are looking at ‘motivational factors’ as risk factors and identify trends and patterns that are both persistent and related to specific time and space contexts. Our analyses are based on a data set with more than 200 cases of alleged corporate involvement spanning the time since 1940. We use latent cluster modelling to explore patterns of branches of industry, corporate structures, business activities and characteristics of the crimes, in order to establish risk profiles of corporations across time and space.  We identify six risk-profiles across the decades from 1940 – 2020 that are conducive to corporate involvement in massive violence and identify exemplary cases for these. We conclude with lessons for regulatory theory and practice. 

ד”ר עו”ד יעל קריב-טייטלבאום אחראית על צוות רפורמות רוחביות ברגולציה באשכול רגולציה במחלקת יעוץ וחקיקה (משפט כלכלי) במשרד המשפטים, מרצה מן החוץ באוניברסיטת ירושלים ותל-אביב, וחוקרת בתחומי הרגולציה, ההפרטה והמשפט הציבורי.

ד”ר יעל קריב-טייטלבאום, רגולציה אג’ילית (זמישה): הבטחה, פנטזיה או פרדוקס? מפגש פתיחת שנת הלימודים של קבוצת המחקר במדיניות רגולציה וממשל, יום רביעי 11 באוקטובר 2023, בין השעות 14.00 ל-15.00.

העידן הנוכחי מתאפיין בקצב חסר תקדים של שינויים. מגפה גלובלית, טכנולוגיות חדשות, שינוי אקלים, אי-ודאות כלכלית ועוד מאתגרים את הרגולטורים האמונים על ההגנה על אינטרסים ציבוריים חשובים. יותר ויותר מערכות רגולטוריות נתפסות כבלתי מעודכנות וכחסרות את הכלים הנדרשים להתמודדות עם הקצב המאיץ של השינויים ומורכבותם הגוברת. במציאות זו, הרגולציה לעיתים קרובות חוסמת שינויים רצויים או נכשלת בהגנה מפני סיכונים חדשים בלתי רצויים. על רקע זה, עולה הצורך בפרדיגמה רחבה יותר לאסדרה: רגולציה אג’ילית Agile, ובתרגום לעברית זמישה – זריזה וגמישה). רגולציה אג’ילית מבקשת לייצר מערכות רגולטוריות שהן יותר דינמיות, לומדות, זריזות, גמישות, ניסיוניות, חדשניות וסתגלניות. היא נשענת בחלקה על האדנים הרחבים של גישות רגולטוריות קודמות שביקשו לקדם יכולות אלו, כגון רגולציה תגובתית, רגולציה נסיינית, רגולציה גמישה, רגולציה משתפת, רגולציה דינמית, רגולציה אדפטיבית ועוד. על רקע ההמלצות האחרונות של ה-WEF והOECD- לפעול לקידום רגולציה אג’ילית, ההרצאה תבקש להציג לראשונה תיאוריה של רגולציה אג’ילית, תוך התחקות אחר מקורות הגישה האג’ילית בפיתוח תוכנה וניהול פרויקטים. נבחן האם הרעיון של רגולציה אג’ילית הוא הבטחה, פנטזיה או פרדוקס, כיצד ניתן ליישם את העקרונות האג’ילים ברגולציה, ומהם האתגרים הפרקטיים והמשפטיים בהטמעת הגישה האג’ילית במערכות רגולטוריות.

Agnieszka Smoleńska is assistant professor at the Institute of Law Studies (Polish Academy of Sciences) and postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Agnieszka Smoleńska, Integrating sustainability in financial supervision – exploring complementarities across institutional contexts, Monday, July 17^th 2023, 14.00-15.00 CET; 15.00-16.00 Jerusalem Time.

How do institutional factors shape prudential supervisors’ responses to the sustainability challenge? The Paris Agreement committed the signatories to make financial flows consistent with a net zero future. A regulatory wave is mounting in individual jurisdictions and via a variety of new international networks and standard setting bodies emerging to facilitate the development of adequate approaches and methodologies to ‘green’ finance. In this context, the institutional factors that shape the financial supervisors’ individual approaches remain underexplored. Meanwhile, how authorities are using the prudential frameworks to address environmental and social risks differs significantly, even among the ‘leaders’ of the sustainable finance trend in the European Union (Banking Union, Hungary, Sweden) and beyond (Brazil, United Kingdom and China). The lecture discusses the legal-institutional factors to explain this heterogeneity, including by exploring the scope of supervisory mandates, the institutional set-ups (e.g. whether the supervisor is a central bank or a separate authority), agencies’ independence and accountability mechanisms. Such analysis leads to formulating propositions concerning the ‘institutional fit’ between supervisory architectures and specific regulatory solutions in relation to the integration environmental and social risks in financial sector oversight.

David Levi-Faur talks with Andreas Kruck, Moritz Weiss, Ingvild Bode and Philipp Genschel on the new special issue of JEPP on The Regulatory Security State in Europe, Thursday, June 22 2023, 14:00-15:00 CEST; 15:00-16:00 Jerusalem Time.

Who governs European security, by what means, and on what legitimatory grounds? The conventional wisdom is that European security is still the realm of the sovereign and ‘positive state’. In their forthcoming Special Issue of the Journal of European Public Policy (2023, 30:7), Andreas Kruck and Moritz Weiss challenge this conventional wisdom. They conceive of both the EU and its member states as emerging ‘regulatory security states’ in many fields of European security policy-making.

This webinar discusses the notion of a “regulatory security state” in Europe. Andreas Kruck and Moritz Weiss will introduce the concept of a “regulatory security state” and report key findings from the JEPP Special Issue on its manifestations, its drivers and constraints, as well as its implications. Ingvild Bode will discuss how the epistemic authority of private corporate actors shapes the ‘front- and back-door regulation’ of AI’s military applications in the EU. Philipp Genschel challenges Kruck’s and Weiss’ claims about the emergence of a European regulatory security state on theoretical and empirical grounds. David Levi-Faur suggests a re-conceptualization of the ‘regulatory security state’ as a ‘risk state’. The webinar thus explores the opportunities that a regulatory governance approach holds for the analysis of (European) security; and it offers a space where the speakers and webinar participants can engage in a critical debate on how security is provided in Europe’s multi-level polity, in particular in times of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Andreas Kruck is Senior Lecturer in Global Governance at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich.

Moritz Weiss is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich.

Ingvild Bode is Associate Professor at the Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark, and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded “AutoNorms” project.

Philipp Genschel is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Bremen and a former Professor of European Public Policy at the European University Institute in Florence.

Eva Thomann is a full professor of Public Administration at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz.

Eva Thomann, Explaining divergence in street-level bureaucracies: the accountability regimes framework, Tuesday, June 20^th 2023, 14.00-15.00 CET; 15.00-16.00 Jerusalem Time.

Street-level bureaucrats are crucial actors for delivering regulation, who often diverge from formal policies in practice. Moreover, next to their role as policy implementers, they are embedded in a complex web of social roles and relationships with peers, clients, employers, and other citizens. The accountability regimes framework (ARF) models this complexity and helps scholars to explain how conflicting accountabilities, in the form of accountability dilemmas, affect divergence. This lecture presents the ARF and illustrates it empirically based on the case of the Prevent Duty in the United Kingdom (UK). In this politicized policy environment, the ARF models how street-level bureaucrats become informal policymakers in the political system when rules clash with their roles as professionals, citizen-agents, or “political animals.”. Three testable propositions are presented for future research on how street-level accountabilities and dilemmas influence the actual behaviour of street-level bureaucrats, together with initial supportive evidence.

Alessia Damonte is Associate Professor at the University of Milan, Dept. of Social and Political Sciences.

Alessia Damonte, Types of Causality Analysis in the Social Sciences: Regularity, Counterfactual, Manipulability/interventionist, and Mechanistic, Wednesday, June 7^th 2023, 15.00-16.00 CET; 16.00-17.00 Jerusalem Time.

The talk considers whether the different understandings of causation in the social sciences — regularity, counterfactual, manipulability/interventionist, and mechanistic — raise insurmountable barriers to exchange and learning across research communities. It highlights the ontological, epistemological, and methodological differences between accounts and considers possible complementarities. Last, it encourages researchers to rely on causal structures as a fruitful common ground to improve learning across different accounts. The backing material can be found at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-12982-7_11

Yannis Papadopoulos is a professor of public policy at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne and a member of the Laboratoire d’analyse de la gouvernance et de l’action publique en Europe (LAGAPE).

David Levi-Faur talks with Yannis Papadopoulos on his new book in the Cambridge Elements Series, Tuesday, June 6^th, 2023, 14:00 CET; 15:00 Jerusalem Time.

Will discuss the following issues:

1) What is accountability exactly about?
2) Do competitive elections operate (as expected) as an effective instrument for the accountability of governments in democratic states? How much do they contribute to policy being responsive to the preferences of the electorate?
3) In addition to vertical accountability to voters, horizontal accountability of public authorities (i.e. the existence of checks-and-balances/counterpowers) matters for the quality of democracy: How can a balance be ensured? Should we care about the judicialization of politics?
4) What is the impact of governance transformations and of administrative reforms on political and administrative accountability?
5) Can we count on the media as effective watchdogs?
6) What is the appropriate accountable behavior in times of crises?
7) What kind of lessons on the behavior of individuals subject to accountability pressure can we draw from experimental work in social and organizational psychology?
8) Is there anything that this book, comprehensive in its goals but very short, does not cover?

Dionys Zink is a doctoral researcher at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (LMU) and currently visiting researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Christoph Knill is Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at the Ludwig- Maximilians-University of Munich.

Dionys Zink & Christoph Knill, Condemned to Policy Triage? How implementing agencies deal with overload, Thursday, May 18^th 2023,  14.00-14.45 CET; 15.00-15.45 Jerusalem Time.

Policy accumulation – the constant increase of a country’s policy stock – can lead to an overburdening of actors tasked with implementation. When uncompensated growth is not countered with an adequate growth in resources on the organizational level, implementers are put between a rock and a hard place: they are forced to adopt a routine of policy triage – a systematic prioritization of one policy at the (partial) neglect of another. The level of overburdening and the resulting extent of policy triage centrally depends on the interplay of two factors: how vulnerable organizations are to overload and how good their overload compensation capabilities are. Yet, we know comparatively little about how implementing authorities in modern democracies are affected by those factors. To this end, we scrutinize accumulation induced policy triage by comparing the behavior of implementing authorities in six countries across two policy areas, environmental and social. We find significant variation not only across sectors and countries but also among agencies within countries. Unlike macro-level frameworks such as administrative traditions or styles of policy making, the explanatory factors put forward in the concept of policy triage do account for variation not only across but also within countries as well as sectors.

Tobias Bach is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway.

Christian Schuster is Professor in Public Management at University College London.

Tobias Bach (University of Oslo) and Christian Schuster (University College London), Innovations in Surveying Civil Servants: The Norwegian Panel of Public Administrators and the Global Survey of Public Servants. Friday, April 28^th, 2023, 14:00 CET; 15:00 Jerusalem.

The Norwegian Panel of Public Administrators: Surveys are a key instrument for data collection in public administration research. Survey experiments have become mainstream and are key for drawing causal instead of correlational inferences. An alternative, although less frequent approach, are panel studies where the same respondents are surveyed several times. But individual-level panel data are indeed rare in PA, and even time-series data on public administrators’ attitudes and behaviours which would allow to observe trends over time are uncommon. Moreover, survey researchers struggle to get access to a limited pool of respondents, especially in central governments, and collected data is often not shared within the community. A promising way forward to address these challenges is the creation of permanent survey infrastructures that are open for multiple research groups. The talk will present the Norwegian Panel of Public Administrators, which consists of employees in ministries and regulatory and executive agencies who consent to respond to online surveys twice a year. The panel is part of a larger collaborative infrastructure comprising a citizen panel and a politician panel, which allows for conducting paired surveys with key actors in the democratic system. The talk will present the Norwegian Panel of Public Administrators and highlight opportunities and challenges of simultaneously conducting research on different populations.

Global Survey of Public Servants: Understanding how public administrations around the world function and differ is crucial for strengthening their effectiveness. Most comparative measures of bureaucracy rely on surveys of experts, households, or firms, rather than directly questioning bureaucrats. Direct surveys of public officials create granular data for analysis and government action, so are becoming a cornerstone of public sector management. This presentation introduces the Global Survey of Public Servants (GSPS), a global initiative to collect and harmonize large-scale, comparable survey data on public servants. The corresponding GSPS data set currently contains responses from 1,300,000+ bureaucrats in 1,300+ government institutions in 23 countries. The surveys measure both employee attitudes (such as job satisfaction and motivation), and their experience with management practices (such as recruitment and performance management). This harmonized data enables governments to benchmark themselves and scholars to study comparative public administration and the state differently, based on micro-data from actors who experience government first-hand.

Jarmo Vakkuri is Professor of Local Public Economics, and the director of the research group on Public Financial Management at Tampere University and visiting Professor at Norwegian School of Economics.

Jan-Erik Johanson is a Professor and director of research group of Administrative Science at Tampere University, Finland. 

David Levi-Faur discuss hybridity with Jarmo Vakkuri and Jan-Erik Johanson, Thursday, 20^th April 2023; 14:00 CET; 15.00 Jerusalem Time.

In research, hybridity refers to the interface of government, business and civil society through distinct modes of ownership, competing institutional logics, diversity of funding and multiple forms of control. For many reasons, theories of governance cannot provide us with unambiguous models on how the hybridity of society ought to be governed and, respectively, what the roles and value-creation mechanisms of different actors, be they government agencies, business companies, or nonprofit organizations, could be. While different institutional domains have a role in how intended aims of public policies and societal missions ultimately transpire, governments have fundamental problems with understanding why, how and with policy impacts this occurs. This presentation discusses hybridity and hybridization in governing societal activities by addressing emerging relationships, rationalities and value conflicts among different actors. We introduce important results from prior research and explore the role and impacts of institutional hybridity at different levels of society.

Jörn Ege, Michael W. Bauer, Nora Wagner, Eva Thomann, Does Bureaucracy Matter in the Making of Global Public Policies? Monday, January 30^th 2023, 12.00 London time; 13.00 CET; 14.00 Jerusalem.

This talk deals with how configurations of bureaucratic autonomy, policy complexity and political contestation allow international public administrations (IPAs) to influence policymaking within international organizations. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 17 policy decisions in four organizations (FAO, WHO, ILO, UNESCO) shows that all IPAs studied can be influential in favorable contexts. When policies are both contested and complex, even IPAs lacking autonomy can influence policy. If either complexity or contestation is absent, however, it is the variant of autonomy of will that helps the IPA exploit procedural strategies of influence. Low autonomy of will, among other factors, explains why IPAs cannot exert influence. Conversely, the variant of autonomy of action appears largely irrelevant. We present new insights into the role of bureaucracy beyond the state, exemplifying how research of bureaucratic influence can yield more systematic results in various empirical settings.

Jörn Ege is a Lecturer of Local & Regional Governance at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) in Winterthur, CH.

Michael W. Bauer holds the chair of Public Administration at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute, Florence.

Nora Wagner is Advisor to the Vice-President for Studying, Teaching and International Affairs at RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Eva Thomann is a full professor of Public Administration at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz.

Roselyn Hsueh is an associate professor of political science at Temple University, where she co-directs the certificate program in political economy.

Roselyn Hsueh, How Strategic Value and Sectors Shape Regulation and Governance, Wednesday, January 18^th 2023, 10.00 AM EST; 16.00 CET; 17.00 Jerusalem Time.

In this seminar, Roselyn Hsueh shares findings from her new book, Micro-institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Drawing on research in China, India, and Russia and examining sectors from textiles to telecommunications, the book introduces a new theory of sectoral pathways to globalization and development. Bridging materialist arguments with constructivism and historical institutionalism, the book’s Strategic Value Framework shows how state elites perceive the strategic value of sectors in response to internal and external pressures and the impacts of sectoral structures and organization of institutions. The resultant dominant patterns of market governance vary by country and sector within country. These “national configurations of sectoral models” challenge the conventional wisdom of developmental versus neoliberal state and national versus subnational variation and reevaluates the role of regime type and open economy politics in globalization trajectories. The book’s multilevel comparative case research design draws from immersive fieldwork, leverages attention to context specificity and a variety of qualitative and quantitative data, and extends Hsueh’s comparative work on the politics of market reform and China’s regulatory state.

Jacint Jordana is Professor of Political Science and Administration at Pompeu Fabra University and ICREA Academia researcher.

Jacint Jordana, Measuring independence and accountability of QA Agencies: Europe and Latin America Compared, Monday, January 9^th 2023, 19.00 Jerusalem Time; 18.00 CEST.

Quality assurance in higher education policy is a key concern in current times. Introduced as new instrument to steer this sector a few decades ago, the management of higher education evaluation and accreditation has progressively separated from the executive, enabling the rise of quality assurance agencies (QAAs) to take charge of these supervisory activities.  QAAs rapidly emerged as autonomous public bodies, based on the rationale that providers of higher education and quality supervisors have to remain separate to make supervision credible, to avoid conflicts of interest. We will examine variations in the institutional design of QAAs, which are quite visible across countries and regions. In particular, we focus on the political independence and the social accountability dimensions of these agencies through the analysis of the legal rules under which they operate. An index synthetizing each dimension allows to compare the results obtained across Europe and Latin America. Further, a discussion on the role of expertise and representativeness in agencies’ governing bodies is introduced, examining their implications for agencies’ political independence and accountability. Moreover, we inquire if there are countries exhibiting specific ‘regulatory styles’ in the field of higher education, developing different institutional agency designs.

Michael Dobbins is adjunct professor of policy analysis at the University of Konstanz.

Michael Dobbins, Higher Education Governance in Europe: The Impact of Transnational Soft Governance, Monday, January 2nd 2023, 19.00 Jerusalem Time; 18.00 CEST.

The presentation addresses three crucial questions: How does the state react to transnational pressures for change? How is transnationally inspired policy change ‘digested’ by the preexisting country-specific governance structures? And to what extent have national HE systems converged on a common governance model?  The speaker will present a multi-level comparative analysis of developments in Germany, France, Italy, and Poland in particular. He first breaks down higher education governance into sub-dimensions and derive concrete policy indicators for three historically embedded governance ideal types. Drawing on historical institutionalism and institutional isomorphism, he shows historical legacies and transnational communication have impacted policy pathways over the past 30 years. The presentation is supported by graphic illustrations of the policy trajectories with ‘governance triangles’, which encompass the balance of power between multiple actors, including the state and universities, university management and the academic profession, and external stakeholders.

Christine Musselin is a member of the Centre for the Sociology of Organizations (CS0), a Sciences Po and CNRS research unit.

Christine Musselin, Is the Governance of University Unique?, Monday, 28 November 2022, 19.00 Jerusalem Time; 18.00 CEST.

In her talk Christine Musselin will first provide an overview of the literature on university governance. She will then argue that despite the reforms aimed at empowering academic leaders and introducing managerial practices and instruments in higher education institutions, university governance remains specific in two ways. First because universities all rely on a mix of administrative, political and deliberative forms of coordination. Second because, intrinsically, teaching and research are loosely coupled activities mobilizing unclear technologies: therefore they are hardly compatible with top-down leadership.

Ben Cashore is the Li Ka Shing Professor in Public Management, and director, the Institute of Environment and Sustainability, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy National University of Singapore.

Benjamin Cashore, How Sustainability Governance is Failing our Planet and What to Do About it, Monday 28^th of November, 2022, 15.00 Jerusalem Time; 14.00 CEST.

Despite widespread engagement of the private sector in the development, and implementation of finance and market driven policy innovations during the past three decades, we are witnessing the alarming acceleration of critical environmental challenges impacting the planet. This talk reviews the plausibility of a counterintuitive explanation for these trends: that the correlations between the proliferation of private sector engagement in, and reinforcing of FMD solutions alongside the acceleration of environmental crises, is not owing to poor policy design and implementation challenges, but rather, to highly successful, but competing, sustainability transformation projects. This talk explores the potential of this argument by reviewing Cashore’s four sustainability problem conceptions and four sustainability transformation projects, each of which are reinforced by four distinct schools: commons (Type 1), optimization (Type 2), compromise (Type 3) and prioritization (Type 4). I argue, that transitions conforming to Type 4 conceptions have given way, over the last 30 years, to fostering Type 3, 2 and 1 transformations– despite overwhelming evidence that these motivations are largely the cause of environmental degradation. I illustrate the plausibility of this argument by first reviewing the proliferation of private sector engagement in innovations over the last 30 years designed to ameliorate a range of “real world” sustainability policy challenges, most recently articulated through the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs). For analytical traction, I draw on select examples developed to ameliorate forest sector sustainability challenges. I then review the four schools of sustainability, including implications for “whack-a-mole” effects: i.e., those cases in which solving one problem makes another worse. I then draw on this framework to reinterpret the emergence, design, and competing ideas of sustainability transformations within the Forest Stewardship Council, REDD+, legality verification (LV), as well today’s heavy emphasis on corporate “no-deforestation” and “net zero” commitments. Finally, I reflect on how greater attention to “thermostatic” mechanisms, policies and institutions, might be applied to reorient the private governance and public private policy mixes towards achieving, rather than exacerbating, Type 4 environmental transformations.

B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of Government at the University of Pittsburgh, and founding President of the International Public Policy Association. 

Guy Peters, What is Policy Coordination, and Why Should We Care?, Tuesday, May 17^th, 2022, 9.00-10.00 EST; 15.00-16.00 CET; 16.00-17.00 Jerusalem.

Policy coordination and coherence have been a major concern for governments ever since they have existed. Despite the importance of coordination for governing, there is no agreed definition of what is meant by the term, and certainly no clear answers about how to build better-coordianted policy systems. Further, coordination is not an undivided benefit, and it alternative of higher levels of specialization also has benefits. This lecture will explore these and other questions about coordination, and the ways to create more effective policymaking.

Giliberto Capano is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Giliberto Capano, The Governance Mantra in Higher Education Policies: Ideas and Instruments, Wednesday, March 30^th, 16.00-17.00 Jerusalem; 15.00-16.00 CET; 14.00-15.00 GMT.

Governance in higher education has undergone substantial shifts in recent decades. It has been a long process of reforms of the ideas and policy instruments adopted to push universities towards behaving in a strategic way and thus to be more accountable to the socio-economic. These reforms have been assessed in different ways, such as by emphasizing the shift to the more supervisory role of the State, the increasing privatization and marketization following the neoliberal paradigm, or the overall process of re-regulation.  Thus the landscape of systemic and institutional governance is significantly changed although it is not completely clear whether and how the expected goals have been completely reached, while it emerges that the actual situation is characterized by a prevailing mix of ideas and instruments.

Per Lægreid is professor emeritus at the Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Norway.

Per Lægreid, Taking Stock of the Whole-of-Government Approach,  Tuesday, March 15th, 2022, 15.00-16.00 CET,  16.00-17.00 Jerusalem.

This talk is taking stock of the Whole-of-Government Reform by discussing trends and challenges. This reform trajectory is contrasted to NPM describing it as a loose concept with multiple driving forces, diversity regarding scope and intensity, and ambiguous effects.  Whole-of-Government reforms have become more popular in recent decades but it is not the only show in town, and we face increased hybridity and complexity in the reform landscape.  A main challenge is how to organize for smart practice and get out of the silos in order to address the wicked issues in which the problem structure does not overlap with the organization structure.

Webinar video available here

Martino Maggetti is an associate professor of political science at the Institute of Political Studies at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Philipp Trein is an assistant professor of public administration and policy at the University of Lausanne and a Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley.

Martino Maggetti and Philipp Trein, Policy Integration and the Politics of Governing Complex Problems, Thursday, March 10th, 2022, 11.00-12.00 CET; 12.00-13.00 Jerusalem time.

A common insight from scholarship in regulation, public administration, and public policy suggests that rulemaking often happens in specialized communities of actors. Nevertheless, coordination between different areas of the policy and regulatory ecosystem is difficult and pressing policy problems such as climate change, public health crises, and fiscal pressures require the coordination of different policy communities to effectively address the cause of societal problems. Researchers have acknowledged for a long time that the coordination of actors and policies is a major challenge for decision-makers. More recently, scholars from very different backgrounds have built on this research and analyzed how responses to complex problems can be integrated into existing policy and regulatory systems

This talk will introduce the audience to the conceptual background of policy integration research and discuss the main research questions scholars have addressed in this research approach. In a second step, the presentation will provide insights from different empirical research projects that analyze policy integration and provide insights into some of the main findings from this work. Eventually, the presentation will conclude by elaborating some of the challenges for policy integration research and discuss the road ahead for this type of research.

Webinar video available here

David Coen is Professor of Public Policy and founding Director of the Global Governance Institute at University College London.

David Coen, Business Lobbying in the EU, Thursday, February 10^th, 12.00 London; 15.00 CET; 9.00 AM EST; 16.00 Jerusalem.

At a time when Europe and business stand at crossroads, this study provides a perspective into how business representation in the EU has evolved and valuable insights into how to organize lobbying strategies and influence policy-making. Uniquely, the study analyses business lobbying in Brussels by drawing on insights from political science, public management, and business studies.  At the macro level, we explore over 30 years of increasing business lobbying and explore the emergence of a distinct European business-government relations style. At the meso level, we assess how the role of EU institutions, policy types, and the policy cycle shape the density and diversity of business activity. Finally, at the micro-level, we seek to explore how firms organize their political affairs functions and mobilized strategic political responses. The study utilizes a variety of methods to analyze business-government relations drawing on unique company and policy-maker surveys; in-depth case studies and elite interviews; large statistical analysis of lobbying registers to examine business the density and diversity; and managerial career path and organizational analyses to assess corporate political capabilities. In doing so, this study contributes to discussions on corporate political strategy and interest groups’ activity. This monograph should be of interest to public policy scholars, policy-makers, and businesses managers seeking to understand EU government affairs and political representation.  

Webinar video available here

Jonathan Zeitlin is Distinguished Faculty Professor of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Amsterdam and Academic Director of the Amsterdam Center for European Studies (ACES). 

Bernardo Rangoni is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of York.

Jonathan Zeitlin and Bernardo Rangoni, EU regulation between uniformity, differentiation, and experimentalism: electricity and banking compared, Monday, January 31^st, 15.00 CET; 16.00 Jerusalem; 14.00 GMT.

This paper examines how far and under what conditions experimentalist governance (XG), defined as a recursive process of provisional goal setting and revision, based on a comparative review of implementation in different local contexts, may be an effective and legitimate means of responding to diversity among EU member states, in comparison both to conventional uniform regulation (UR) and to differentiated integration (DI).

The paper tackles this question through a comparative analysis of EU regulatory governance in two major policy domains, where the dilemma of how to accommodate national diversity has arisen prominently: electricity and banking. Our findings show that in these two cases the conjunction of high interdependence with high uncertainty has resulted in the emergence of a distinctive type of XG architecture, combining synchronic uniformity with diachronic revisability. Under these conditions, uniform rules and practices can be accepted as effective and legitimate by EU Member States, provided they are applied in contextually sensitive ways and regularly revised on the basis of implementation experience, through deliberative review processes in which national officials themselves participate.

Our findings thus suggest that far from uniformity and experimentalism being antithetical to one another, diachronic experimentalism may be a necessary condition for synchronic uniformity of regulation within a heterogeneous polity like the EU. Our findings on EU banking regulation, where non-euro Member States may opt-out of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), but where both the SSM and the European Banking Authority (EBA) operate along experimentalist lines, further suggests that XG and DI may be complementary, but asymmetrically so, in that the latter depends on the former to accommodate diversity within and across Member States, but not vice versa. 

Webinar video available here

Nir Kosti is a Ph.D. candidate at the Political Science department at the Hebrew University, a fellow of the Advanced Graduate Studies Program (Telem), and the Center for Interdisciplinary Data Science Research (CIDR) at the Hebrew University.

Nir Kosti, Regulatory Discretion: Conceptualization and Measurement (Work in Progress), Tuesday, January 25^th, 2022, 14.00-15.00 CET; 8.00-9.00 AM EST; 15.00-16.00 Jerusalem.

Regulatory discretion is a central concept in the study of the regulatory state and the regulatory explosion of our generation. Yet little attention has been paid to the origins of regulatory discretion, and how it varies across polities, policy areas, and over time. In this lecture, I will present a conceptualization of regulatory discretion that draws on three dimensions: the discretion in choosing whether to regulate, the discretion in determining the regulatory content, and the discretion to control the regulatory process vis-à-vis other actors. I will then argue that to measure regulatory discretion, we need, first, to identify the transfer of regulatory powers, and later to examine the extent to which the authority to make regulation is structured by the legislative language. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, I will present novel findings of regulatory discretion based on UK legislations between 1900 and 2020. The findings show how delegation has become more formalized and perhaps less personalized, making the arbitrary use of powers more difficult.  

Webinar video available here

Daniel Trnka works as a Deputy Head of the Regulatory Policy Division of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), leading the Regulatory Management and Delivery Team.

Daniel Trnka, Regulation Policy 2.0, Thursday, January 20^th, 2022, 13.00-14.00 CET; 7.00-8.00 AM EST; 14.00-15.00 Jerusalem

There has been a lot of progress in implementing regulatory management tools since the OECD Council adopted its Recommendation on Regulatory Policy and Governance in 2012. However, the implementation of those tools is still uneven in many jurisdictions and, moreover, their use is often only formal. There is still a long way to go before we can say that Recommendation is adhered to by all OECD countries. At the same time, the world is evolving and was, even before the Covid-19 outbreak, far from being the same as in 2012 when the Recommendations were issued. The question then is: is regulatory policy, its vision, and its tools, still valid and, more importantly, is it fit for the future? Most likely it is but there are some changes that need to be made, both to the vision but also to the better regulation toolbox and the way it is used. These are related, for example, to the fast technological developments and more agile regulatory approaches, better focus on regulator delivery and risk management, better international regulatory co-operation as well as more emphasis on non-economic impacts of regulation.

Webinar video available here

Kirk Bnsak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Kirk Bansak, Recent Research in the Design and Analysis of Conjoint Experiments, Thursday the 16^th of December 2021; 8.00 AM pacific time;  17.00 CET Time;  18.00 Jerusalem Time. 

Conjoint survey experiments have come to see extensive use in political science and other social sciences. In addition, the past several years have also seen valuable methodological research on conjoint experiments, providing applied researchers with new sets of best practices and approaches for getting the most out of their designs and data. This workshop will discuss recent research on the design and analysis of conjoint experiments, as well as highlight promising avenues for future research.

Webinar video available here

Alessia Damonte is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Milan “la Statale.”

Alessia Damonte, Configurational Explanations, Wednesday, December 15th; 2021, 12.00 CET; 13.00  Jerusalem.

How can Qualitative Comparative Analysis contribute to causal knowledge? This talk builds on the shift from design to models that the Structural Causal Model framework has compelled in the probabilistic analysis of causation. From this viewpoint, models refine the claim that a ‘treatment’ has causal relevance as they specify the ‘covariates’ that make some units responsive. It will make the point that Qualitative Comparative Analysis’ contribution rests on its capacity to select plausible ‘covariates’ and provide configurational explanations of the cases at hand. Besides, the basic structures of the SCM can widen the interpretability of configurational solutions and deepen the dialogue among techniques.

Webinar video available here

Claire A. Dunlop is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Exeter. Jonathan Kamkhaji  works at the Department of Engineering Management of the Politecnico of Milan as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Claudio M. Radaelli is Chair of Comparative Public Policy, School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute. Gaia Taffoni is post-doc research fellow and teaching associate at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute, Florence. Claudius Wagemann is a full Professor for qualitative-comparative political science methods at Goethe University Frankfurt, as well as a part-time Professor for methods at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute, Florence.

Claire A. Dunlop, Jonathan C. Kamkhaji, Claudio M. Radaelli, Gaia Taffoni & Claudius Wagemann, Regulatory Procedures and Governance Outcomes, Friday, October 22^nd, 2021, 14.00 CET, 13.00 London. 15.00 Jerusalem.

In this presentation for the seminar series Theories of Regulatory Governance we blend theory and empirical analysis by addressing the topic of the causal effects of rulemaking procedures on governance outcomes. Our topic is the design of the following four procedures in the EU-27 and the UK: consultation in the preparation of new legislation, freedom of information, impact assessment of policy proposals, and the Ombudsman.   Procedural instruments that open up rulemaking to a variety of interests and actors are supposed to lead to better rules. In turn, better rules should over time increase the quality of the business environment, mitigate corruption, and contribute to more sustainable policies. This claim, often echoed in the better regulation discourse, however obscures some important causal steps rooted in mechanisms that have to be considered carefully before testing causality empirically. We first draw on theory to introduce a common measuring instrument for these four procedures, and explain how we generated a new dataset. The data are then used to map the ecological, conjunctural effect of design features on the quality of the business environment, perceptions of corruption and sustainability. We discuss a number of pathways and their implications for policy (re)design.  The presentation draws on research carried out with support from the project Procedural tools for effective governance, Protego, funded by the European Research Council.

Webinar video available here

Paul t’ Hart is currently a professor of Public Administration at Utrecht University.

Paul ‘t Hart, Take a Walk on the Bright Side: What Might We Learn about Public Governance by Studying Its Successes? Wednesday, October 20^th, 2021, 15.00 CET; 14.00 London; 16.00 Jerusalem.

I will present the rationale for and some lessons learned of a program of research that has been undertaken since 2016 at Utrecht University in close collaboration with dozens of scholars around the world. It is devoted to studying high performing public policies/programs, public organizations, and collaborative governance networks. The core question driving it was as follows: Why is it that particular public policies, programs, organizations, networks, or partnerships manage do much better than others to produce widely valued societal outcomes? In other words: what are the drivers/enablers of successful public governance? Answering those questions required us to first develop a ‘language for success’ and a methodology of identifying ‘success cases’ as well as forms and degrees of success in a systematic and transparent manner. Five years in, we are beginning to get a handle on these questions, and I will reflect on how we got to where we are today, and whether a case can be made for working towards a ‘positive public governance’ subfield, akin that e.g. positive organizational studies and positive psychology.

Webinar video available here

Sofia Ranchordas is Full Professor of EU and Comparative Public Law, Faculty of Law, University of Groningen & Professor of Law, Innovation & Sustainability at LUISS Guido Carli (part-time).

Sofia Ranchordas, Regulatory Innovation, Future-Proofing, and Experimental Regulation: The Case of AI Regulation, Thursday, September 23^rd, 2021, 14.00 CET, 13.00 London;  15.00 Jerusalem.

Recent EU legislative and governance initiatives aim to pave the way for flexible, innovation-friendly, and future-proof regulatory frameworks. Key examples are the adoption of the innovation principle, the EU Coordinated Plan on AI and the AI Regulation Proposal. The latter presents regulatory sandboxes as a tool with the potential to advance innovation in this field while mitigating the potential risks of novel AI systems. Originally developed in the Fintech sector, regulatory sandboxes create a test bed for a small selected number of innovative projects, by waiving otherwise applicable rules, guiding compliance, or customizing enforcement. Despite the burgeoning literature on regulatory sandboxes and the regulation of AI, the legal, methodological, and ethical challenges of anticipatory and adaptive regulatory frameworks have remained understudied. This keynote aims to address this gap. Its contribution is threefold. First, this keynote will contextualize the adoption of regulatory sandboxes in the broader discussion on regulatory innovation and experimental approaches to regulation. Second, it offers a methodological reflection on the steps ahead for the design and implementation of AI regulatory sandboxes. Third, it discusses some of the challenges of embracing an anticipatory and future-proof approach to regulation.

Webinar video available here

Carolyn Tuohy is a professor emeritus of political science and distinguished fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Carolyn Tuohy, Institutional Narratives and Contemporary Challenges to Regulatory Governance, Tuesday, September 14^th 2021, 15.00 CET; 16.00 Jerusalem; 14.00 London; 9.00 EST.

Regulation is an inherently institutional activity. Responding to contemporary challenges of regulation and governance requires that we “think institutionally” – and that in turn means “thinking narratively.”  Institutions, in Thelen’s pithy phrase, are sets of “collectively enforced expectations.” Collective enforcement can take various forms: issuing authoritative commands, offering or imposing prices for compliance, and telling persuasive narratives of common commitment.

This presentation will focus on the latter, narrative dimension of institutions – the stories that define the roles of various characters within an overarching plot, and thereby tell us not just what we are required or paid to do but why we do it. Exploring the role of narratives opens up possibilities for responding to urgent contemporary challenges to regulatory governance, especially those presented by the burgeoning development of digital technologies and the looming threat of climate change, all to be addressed in the context of political distrust and the recurrence of populist politics. In particular, this exploration can suggest how narratives can either widen or bridge the gulf between the logico-scientific discourse of “expert” regulators and popular modes of “ordinary knowledge.”

The narrative form is uniquely capable of bridging across modes of understanding, given that it has both a causal spine (in the form of a plot) and an imaginative appeal to experience (in its depiction of characters). Its experiential footing, however, defines and operates within circles of empathy that may be more or less inclusive, so narratives can divide as well as bridge. The degree to which regulatory narratives bridge or divide will depend upon how they interact with their institutional contexts, at the levels of policy, regulatory agency and governmental regime. The degree of narrative congruence at each of these levels will affect the persuasiveness, credibility and durability of regulatory narratives, including their ability to withstand competing narratives.

As a quintessential “regulatory state,” the European Union provides rich ground for exploring the analytic utility of this multi-level narrative perspective. To illustrate, the presentation will conclude with a brief analysis of institutional narratives of the European Commission since 2010 (with particular attention to Presidential State of the European Union addresses), as they relate to the evolving EU policy agenda.

Webinar video available here

Dr. Melissa Rorie is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV).

Melissa Rorie and Benjamin Van Rooij, Measuring Compliance: The Challenges in Assessing and Understanding the Interaction between Law and Organizational Misconduct, Tuesday, August 31^st, 2021,  17.00 CET; 18.00 Jerusalem, 16.00 London and 8.00 Pacific Time.

A major question in corporate compliance research and practice is how to establish the effectiveness of compliance programs and policies on promoting desirable outcomes. To assess such effectiveness requires proper measurement. This chapter, which is the introduction to an edited volume on corporate compliance measurement, discusses the trade-offs involved in using different quantitative and qualitative approaches to measure corporate compliance and its predictors. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of different research strategies in terms of their validity in capturing behavioral responses, their ability to establish causality, their precision in showing complexity, their generalizability, and their feasibility and cost-effectiveness. The chapter concludes that a mixed-methods approach is the best way to reduce the trade-offs in measurement; using such an approach best accommodates the five quality standards of proper measurement. Paper available here.

Professor Benjamin van Rooij is Faculty Director of Research and Professor of Law and Society at the Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam.

Webinar video available here

Christine Parker, From Responsive Regulation to Ecological Compliance, Friday, August 27^th 2021, 12.00 CET; 13.00 Jerusalem; 11.00 London; 20.00 Melbourne.

Professor Parker will argue that the chief achievement of business compliance scholarship to date has been to expand our understanding of compliance from a technocratic instrumental rule by rule calculation; to a complex network of civic responsibilities exemplified by Ayres and Braithwaite’s responsive regulation. However, all business activity and indeed human development now face the existential challenge of socio-ecological disruption driven to a large degree by profit-oriented commercial activity. This is a major failure of what she calls ‘ecological compliance’ – and one that urgently demands further development in policy and scholarship.

Christine Parker is a Professor at Melbourne Law School, and Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society.

Webinar video available here

Colin Scott has been Professor of EU Regulation and Governance at UCD Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin since 2006 and currently serves as Vice President for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Dean of Social Sciences at UCD.

Colin Scott, Mining the Irish State Administration Database for Regulatory Nuggets, Thursday, July 29^th 2021, 14.00 CET; 13.00 London; 15.00 Jerusalem.

The Irish State Administration Database (ISAD) was constructed in the latter years of the noughties by a team at University College Dublin Geary Institute for Public Policy led by Professor Niamh Hardiman, with funding from the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. ISAD combines comprehensive data on central state agencies, including function, policy domain and legal form, with events affecting each such agency, including births, mergers and deaths. Today it is the longest time series database of central state administrations for any country.

ISAD enables the user not only to have a snapshot of the state of the central state machinery of government in any particular year, but also to look at trends over time. The Irish state celebrates its centenary in 2022 and the database will be complete and up to date for public servants, regulatory and other researchers to deploy as a tool to understand key machinery of government trends and to link them to wider governance changes.

For the regulatory scholar we can look at the changing pattern and number of agencies for which regulation is the primary function, but also break this down by sector, asking about the structuring of the central state with respect to regulation of key sectors, such as communications, but also over mixed economy or public functions such as education and health, and whole economy functions such as environmental protection or occupational health and safety. For the enthusiasts, we can even search to understand the changing legal form of bodies exercising regulatory functions.

Whilst such research with the database gives an intriguing picture of Ireland as a regulatory state avant la letter, with a significant number of regulatory agencies established in the first twenty years of the state from 1922, when combined with the pattern of change in delivery agencies it offers a glimpse of the emergence of a model equating to regulatory capitalism in which key service delivery relationships are managed at arms length as distinct and hived-off delivery agencies grown in number. This pattern is both distinctive in Ireland, but also part of a wider set of changes internationally. This paper looks at the distinctive contributions of the Irish experience to understanding of both the regulatory state and regulatory capitalism.

Webinar video available here

Irina Brass is Associate Professor in Regulation, Innovation, and Public Policy at UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy.

Irina Brass,  Agile, Anticipatory, Adaptive: Regulatory Responses to Technology Disruptions and Scientific Innovations, Monday, July 26^th, 14.00 CET; 13.00 London; 15.00 Jerusalem.

Recent scientific and technological innovations across the digital, physical, and biological spheres have arguably pushed our societies into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Governments and key policy stakeholders have responded by advocating more agile, anticipatory, and adaptiveregulations to address the benefits, emerging risks, and uncertainties associated with these disruptive innovations.

In this seminar, Dr Irina Brass will discuss the new mechanisms and structural changes that characterize these regulatory proposals, aiming to understand how they relate to the theory and practice of previous reforms such as better, smart, (really) responsive, or reflexive regulation. Based on a systematic literature review, Dr Brass will argue that anticipatory, adaptive, and agile regulations have some unique features designed to integrate new knowledge about the emergent risks and uncertainties associated with disruptive techno-scientific innovations. Yet, these regulatory proposals do not share a cohesive set of instruments, mechanisms, or regulatory governance practices. Dr Brass will address this gap in the design and implementation of regulatory innovations aimed to respond in a more dynamic manner to technology disruptions and scientific innovations.

Webinar video available here

Prof. Dr. Tanja A. Börzel is professor of political science and holds the Chair for European Integration at the Otto-Suhr-Institute for Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin.

Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse, Effective Governance Under Anarchy: Institutions, Legitimacy, and Social Trust in Areas of Limited Statehood, Monday, June 21^st, 12.00 CET; 13.00 Jerusalem; 11.00 AM London; 6.00 EST.

Policy makers and academics alike have mistakenly promoted an agenda which takes well-governed democratic and consolidated ‘Weberian’ states as the model for the world and the goal of development programs. Whilst Western industrial democracies are the exception, areas of limited statehood where state institutions are weak and ineffective, are everywhere, and, this books argues, can still be well-governed.

Three factors explain effective governance in areas of limited statehood: Fair and transparent institutions ‘fit for purpose’; legitimate governors accepted by the people; and social trust among the citizens. Effective and legitimate governance in the absence of a functioning state is not only provided by international organizations, foreign aid agencies, and non-governmental organizations but also by multi-national companies, rebel groups and other violent non-state actors, ‘traditional’ as well as religious leaders, and community-based organizations. Börzel and Risse base their argument on empirical findings from over a decade of research covering Latin America, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Risse is director of the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at the Otto-Suhr- Institute of Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Webinar video available here

Cary Coglianese is the Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Cary Coglianese, Prospects and Pitfalls of Management-Based Regulation, Tuesday, June 8^th, 10.00-11.00 EST.

Many modern problems emanate from narrow-sighted or low-quality management of organizations. Can governments regulate the quality of organizational management?  The answer is “yes”—they can and they frequently do. In this lecture, Professor Cary Coglianese will discuss the theory and strategy of management-based regulation and explore what is known about how well management-based regulation works. He will fit management-based regulation in a larger framework of regulatory instrument design, showing the conditions under which management-based regulation is likely to prove the best approach for regulators to take. But he will also emphasize that management-based regulation is far from a panacea. To perform well, management-based regulation often requires that regulatory authorities invest in the human capital needed to assess the quality of organizational management and to monitor the performance of organizations subject to the management-based mandates.

Webinar video available here

Jodi L. Short is the Associate Dean for Research and the Honorable Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of the Law.

Jodi Short, The Paranoid Style in Regulatory Policymaking, Thursday, June 3^rd 2021, 8.00 AM PST; 11.00 AM EST; 16.00 London; 17.00 CET and 18.00 Jerusalem.

Regulation is frequently equated with tyranny in political and academic rhetoric. This has consequences that must be better understood.  As I argue in The Paranoid Style in Regulatory Reform, one consequence is that such rhetoric constructs a logic of governance that shapes regulatory policy. So, for instance, as U.S. legal scholars raised increasing concerns about the coercive nature of administrative government, they increasingly advocated voluntary or self-regulatory approaches to regulation. The rhetoric of coercive regulation has only become more shrill in recent years. Politicians speak of the “burden” regulations impose on business and how regulations “smother” economic growth. They illustrate these points by reference to the sheer number of regulations on the books—as if each one exerts an independent weight dragging down the economy and constraining individuals’ freedom to engage in economic activity. Policy makers have sought to address the problem—as so framed—by adopting programs that require agencies to repeal a given number of regulations before they pass a single new one, regardless of the costs and benefits of doing so—revealing that the regulatory reform project was never about economic efficiency. Academics have sought to legitimize these efforts by creating seemingly technocratic regulation counting tools and identifying correlations between regulation counts and economic outcomes of interest. I provide an empirical and theoretical critique of this enterprise in The Trouble with Counting. In my talk, I will explore broader questions about how these efforts support the misrecognition of state tyranny, and I will encourage regulatory scholars to be conscious of the role their work plays in this process.

Webinar video available here

Prof. Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the Centre for Business and Development Studies at Copenhagen Business School.

Stefano Ponte, Business, Power and Sustainability, Thursday, May 20^th  2021, 14.00 CET; 8.00 AM EST, 15:00 Jerusalem.

Managing sustainability concerns is big business. Yet, climate change, rampant deforestation and loss of biodiversity suggest that corporations are not doing nearly enough to address global sustainability challenges. In the name of sustainability, a massive transfer of resources is taking place along global value chains – from the global South to the global North, from producers to global buyers and consumers, and from labour to capital. Global buyers are finding new ways to extract environmental value from their suppliers, while having little actual impact on sustainability. The accumulation of ‘green capital’ goes hand in hand with a failure to tackle ‘brown environments’. Current regulatory instruments are falling short and multi-stakeholder initiatives, social movements and activism still have a long way to go. Drawing from his recent book Business, Power and Sustainability (Zed Books, 2019), Stefano Ponte suggests new ways of addressing the challenges of regulation and governance in the realm of sustainability.

Webinar video available here

Cristie Ford is Professor at the Allard School of Law, The University of British Columbia, Canada.

Cristie Ford, Regulatory Road Maps, Wednesday, May 12^th 2021, 8.00 AM PST; 11.00 AM EST; 16.00 London; 17.00 CET and 18.00 Jerusalem.

Private sector innovation – whether it is Fintech, biotechnology, the platformisation of the economy, or other developments – is the single most profound challenge that regulators confront today. Financial innovations, which are intangible and fast-moving, are especially challenging. Financial regulators are at the operational front line of making sense of the promise and the risks associated with Fintech, and helping to ensure it operates for public benefit.  Faced with such a changeable and fast-moving problem, how can regulators “future proof” themselves? This presentation outlines a road-map for financial regulators who confront fast-moving and profound change in their sectors. It argues that regulators’ first question in any decision-making context should be, “how is private sector innovation, in this case Fintech, undermining my assumptions, changing relationships, denaturing products and markets, and seeping around regulatory definitions and boundaries, right now?”  I set out the four basic questions that regulators should consider. It proposes regulatory responses based on better data collection and analysis, innovation research, network theory, and regulatory design. It considers how to make regulation more adaptable and more resilient, and examines the strategic choices regulators can make in framing Fintech innovations.

Webinar video available here

Christoph Knill is Chair of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Munich.

Christoph Knill, Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap, Monday, April 26^th 2021, 15.00 CET; 14.00 GMT; 16.00 Jerusalem.

The responsiveness to societal demands is both the key virtue and the key problem of modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, responsiveness inevitably entails policy accumulation. While policy accumulation often positively reflects modernization and human progress, it also undermines democratic government in three main ways: First, policy accumulation renders policy content increasingly complex, which crowds out policy substance from public debates and leads to an increasingly unhealthy discursive prioritization of politics over policy. Secondly, policy accumulation comes with aggravating implementation deficits, as it produces administrative backlogs and incentivizes selective implementation. Finally, policy accumulation undermines the pursuit of evidence-based public policy, because it threatens our ability to evaluate the increasingly complex interactions within growing policy mixes. We argue that the stability of democratic systems will crucially depend on their ability to make policy accumulation more sustainable.

Webinar video available here

Jette Steen Knudsen is Professor of Policy and International Business and holds the Shelby Collum Davis Chair in Sustainability.

Jette Steen Knudsen and Hamish van Der Ven, Private Authority and Public Policy Interactions in Global Context, Friday, April 23^rd 2021, 15.00-16.00 CET; 9.00-10.00 EST; 14.00-15.00 GMT; 16.00-17.00 Jerusalem.

This seminar coves the theoretical framework of a new special issue of Regulation & Governance, guest edited by Benjamin Cashore, Jette Steen Knudsen, Jeremy Moon & Hamish van der Ven. The special issuefocuses on two sources of governance – private authority and public policy – and their interactive roles in addressing global governance problems.  Whilst this is not the beginning of such research agendas we aim to offer new considerations.  First, we suggest that private authority and public policy are not simply two distinct and independent spheres but, rather, their interactions are mutually shaping and constitutive of each other.  Secondly, we offer the concept of ‘governance spheres’ in which private authority and public policy influence one another, wittingly or otherwise, and interact, effectively or otherwise, with focal problems.  Our typology advances thinking about the different ways in which this happens. Thirdly, we highlight the dynamics of private authority and public policy interactions, which not only reflect the changing capacities of the two sources of governance, but also their changing legitimation imperatives and the related changing social expectations acting upon them.  We have been fortunate in bringing together scholars with a lively interest in these agendas whose work is immensely stimulating alone and who together provide a wealth of insights and ideas.  It is our hope that the SI will stimulate particular attention to the tensions between democratic legitimacy and problem solving, and the significance of different definitions of, and approaches to, problem solving in governance spheres.  The papers of this special issue are available from Regulation & Governance’s website.

Hamish van der Ven is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Business Management of Natural Resources in the Department of Wood Science.

Webinar video available here

David Vogel is the Soloman Lee Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Business Ethics at Berkeley Haas and Professor Emeritus of Political Science.

David Vogel, The Politics of Preemption: American Federalism and Risk Regulation, Thursday, April 22^nd 2021, 8.00-9.00 PCT; 11.00-12.00 EST; 17.00-18.00 CET; 16.00-17.00 GMT; EST 18.00-19.00 Jerusalem.

The presentation will discuss four examples of risk regulations in the United States, namely vehicle emissions, appliance efficiency, chemical safety, and the labeling of genetically modified food. In each example, consumer or environmental regulations were initiated at the state level despite business opposition. But then faced with a multiplicity of state product regulations, the affected firms decided to support the expansion of federal regulations. They were willing to accept stronger federal standards in order to preempt individual states from enacting more stringent standards than the federal government. This, in turn, led to a conflict between firms who wanted federal preemption of state restrictions and states who wanted to be able to enact regulations more stringent than those of the federal government. The outcomes of each of these conflicts over the scope of federal preemption had important impacts on each multilevel governance regulatory regime. The ability of both levels of the American government to enact more innovative risk regulations – often referred to as dynamic federalism – has made it more likely that they will be strengthened.

Webinar video available here

Cary Coglianese is the Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Cary Coglianese, Seeking Regulatory Excellence: Theory and Praxis, Tuesday, April 6^th 2021, 10.00-11.00 EST; CET; GMT; Jerusalem.

What defines regulatory quality?  How can it be achieved?  These seemingly straightforward questions have motivated much positive and normative research related to regulation in the past. In this lecture, Professor Coglianese will trace out the development of the three of the most widespread theoretical and applied approaches to answering these questions: market intervention theory; institutional and procedural design; and behavioral optimization. He will argue that, although all three approaches have value, what is needed is a fourth, more integrative theory of excellence in regulatory management. Recognizing regulation as a dynamic, relational enterprise, achieving regulatory excellence demands that regulatory leaders integrate normative analysis and positive knowledge to build high-integrity institutions that engage empathically with the public and deliver effective, welfare-enhancing regulatory outcomes.

Webinar video available here

Professor Julia Black is Strategic Director for Innovation at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Julia Black, London School of Economics, Regulatory Dynamics and Dynamic Regulation, Thursday, March 18^th; 15.00 to 16.00 GMT, 16.00 CET; 17.00 Jerusalem.

Will deal and discuss the following questions:

1. What do you mean by ‘regulatory dynamics and dynamic regulation’?
2. Why develop this framework, and what does it add to what we don’t already know?
3. To what extent it reinforces the sense that regulation is a technocratic, value-free, exercise, which downplays/ignores issues of social justice, exclusion etc.?
4. To what extent this framework help scholars and practitioners make regulation more friendly and innovative?
5. What do you think Covid has taught, and is teaching us, about regulatory dynamics in different countries? 

Webinar video available here

Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy.

Matthew D. Adler, Measuring Social Welfare, Thursday, February 11^th 2021. Time: 15.00 CET; 16.00 Jerusalem; 10.00 AM EST; 14.00 GMT.

The social welfare function (SWF) methodology is a systematic framework for assessing governmental policy. It represents a major step beyond cost-benefit analysis (CBA), currently the dominant policy-assessment tool.  While CBA quantifies well-being impacts in monetary units (via the construct of willingness to pay/accept), the SWF framework does so using an interpersonally comparable well-being measure. Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction provides a rigorous but accessible overview and defense of the SWF framework.  This interdisciplinary work is grounded not only in economics but also in philosophy; it draws from philosophical scholarship concerning well-being, consequentialism, distributive justice, and utilitarianism.

Webinar video available here

Professor Benjamin van Rooij is Faculty Director of Research and Professor of Law and Society at the Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam.

Benjamin van Rooij, University of Amsterdam & UC Irvine, Toxic Corporate Culture:  Assessing Organizational Processes of Deviancy, Wednesday, December 12^th 2018.

There is widespread recognition that organizational culture matters in corporations involved in systemic crime and wrongdoing. However, we know far less about how to assess and alter toxic elements within a corporate culture.

The present paper draws on management science, anthropology, sociology of law, criminology, and social psychology to explain what organizational culture is and how it can sustain illegal and harmful corporate behavior. Through analyzing the corporate cultures at BP, Volkswagen, and Wells Fargo, this paper demonstrates that organizational toxicity does not just exist when corporate norms are directly opposed to legal norms, but also when: (a) it condones, neutralizes, or enables rule breaking; (b) it disables and obstructs compliance; and (c) actual practices contrast expressed compliant values.

The paper concludes that detoxing corporate culture requires more than changing leadership or incentive structures. In particular, it requires addressing the structures, values, and practices that enable violations and obstruct compliance within an organization, as well as moving away from a singular focus on liability management (i.e., assigning blame and punishment) to an approach that prioritizes promoting transparency, honesty, and a responsibility to initiate and sustain actual cultural change.