Regulatory Governance workshop
Objectives
Great transformations are unfolding within contemporary society due to developments related to, among other things, the financial crisis, increased globalisation, rapid technological developments, ecological challenges and new types of political conflict. Common for these otherwise very diverse developments is a consistent demand for regulation. Whereas de-regulation, although de facto serving a re-regulatory rather than a de-regulatory purpose, was a buzzword from the 1980s onwards the tide seems to have shifted towards a new demand for governance driven regulation. Accordingly, a multitude of new governance frameworks aimed at stabilising, orchestrating and indeed regulating increasingly globalised social processes has emerged in recent decades.
In most cases great hopes and demands are attached to the potential of regulatory governance. The notion of regulation is however a contested term which has multiple meanings and which is deployed in a large range of different institutional and social settings characterised by different intentions, objectives and normative underpinnings. In addition, the reference to new types of governance in many instances remains elusive and difficult to pin down in practise.
Against this backdrop, this workshop sets out to explore and reassess the notions of regulation and governance and their relation as well as the wider social phenomenon of regulatory governance and especially the potential of governance-driven regulation as a driver of societal change. It does so by raising a number of questions such as: Can the hopes and demands attached to the notion of regulatory governance possibly be fulfilled? What is the functional and normative content of regulatory governance? And to what extent can regulatory governance measures serve as tools for the realisation of normative endeavours?
In order to pin down the notion of regulatory governance and to explore its multifaceted meaning, potential and impact as well as the social praxis of regulatory governance the workshop will approach the phenomenon from three different angles: rules, resistance and responsibility.
Programme: Regulatory Governance Workshop Programme