Enrolling actors in regulatory systems: examples from UK financial services regulation

Abstract

The fragmentation and hybridisation of governance has been a preoccupation of public lawyers and others for some time. Commentators have focused variously on the internal and organisational fragmentation of the executive (the development of next step agencies, for example, and the growth of new control relationships as a consequence of the implementation of strategies of new public management), on the fragmentation and hybridisation of service delivery (contracting-out, public-private partnerships, the private finance initiative), and on the fragmentation and hybridisation of regulation. Concerns have been both to map and analyse the changing nature of the exercise of governance functions and to address the issues of accountability to which such changes have given rise.5 This article focuses on regulation and suggests that we build on existing analyses of regulation as a decentred and fragmented activity by exploring the notions of regulatory capacity and regulatory enrolment, and provides illustrations using examples from the current system of UK financial services regulation. In focusing on regulatory capacity and regulatory enrolment, it is suggested, an analytical framework can be developed which has both prescriptive and descriptive dimensions, and which may facilitate thinking on how regulatory functions are and should be distributed between diverse actors in a regulatory system.

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