Integrating Regulatory Governance and Better Regulation as Reflexive Governance

Policies of better regulation originate with the Reagan and Thatcher governments whose small government agendas led them to become concerned that there might be a tendency to ratchet up the obligations and costs on businesses associated with regulation with little by way of counterveiling mechanisms to curb the urge to increase regulatory burdens (as they saw it). Whereas early policies on both sides of the Atlantic set down objectives of lifting regulatory burdens and deregulation, the language and ethos changed over time. An early foray for the EU in the 1990s targeted simplification of legislation in the internal market (the SLIM programme) and by the late 1990s the OECD, the EU and many of the OECD States were talking about Better Regulation. The EU programmes was briefly restyled as SMART regulation (2010-14), but soon came back to Better. There is a large body of scholarly and policy work concerned with regulatory governance, conceptualising what it is, and is not, how regulatory norms are made, scrutinising the variety of mechanisms through feedback compliance occurs and seeking to better understand when behavioural correction is likely to be effective (Baldwin, Cave and Lodge 2010; Levi-Faur 2012). The policy and practice fields of Better Regulation, which take as their focus the improved efficiency of regulation, has almost completely passed by the scholarly field of regulatory governance which is concerned with both understanding and enhancing regulatory governance. These two policy and scholarly fields have in common a substantial degree of scepticism concerning the capacity and appropriateness of states to regulate businesses wholly through forms of command, anchored in the enforcement of binding legal rules. The trend in both fields is towards seeking to understand better the limits of command and control regulation and the range of alternative mechanisms of steering behaviour. In this chapter I focus on the big picture trends in better regulation and regulatory governance and propose a way of integrating the policy and public policy fields through elaborating the concept of reflexive governance. A key point of focus for this evaluation is the reforms to better regulation initiated by the Juncker Commission which took office in November 2014 and which were launched in May 2015 (European Commission 2015b).