Introduction: Regulatory Governance in Developing Countries

Abstract

This book examines the problems involved in analysing and assessing the regulatory reforms that are now on the economic reform agenda in many developing countries.In developed economies, such well-established reforms are generally regarded as belonging to the post-privatisation phase; but in developing economies, privatisation has itself been an incomplete and faltering process, so that associated regulatory reforms are either new, or poorly understood and conceived: often, privatisation and regulatory reforms will proceed piecemeal, without proper sequencing or coordination.Despite the assumption by influential aid donors such as the World Bank that such reforms will have the merit of taking bureaucrats out of business, many factors in developing country political and economic systems demonstrate a propensity for regulation inside government.Since poor governance is regarded by aid donors as a major obstacle to effective economic reforms, a concern with institutionalising regulatory governance is a crucial aspect of the regulatory reform agenda, and indeed of broader programmes of governance and public sector reforms.A significant feature of the contemporary research agenda on competition and regulation in developing economies has therefore been the emphasis placed on the institutions and processes of governance surrounding and conditioning the progress of these economic policy reforms.This does no more than reflect one of the leading themes in the developed country literature on regulation, usually labelled as 'regulatory governance' and deploying a new concept of the 'regulatory state' to set against the more conventional categories of 'welfare' or 'provider' state.This corresponded clearly enough to the 'new public management' model of public action, which rested on a similar counterposition of the traditional state and the 'enabling' state.The thrust of recent work in this field has been to emphasise the significance of 'regulatory governance' as an essential context that may determine the prospects for regulatory policy success or failure, and to remind policy reformers that their proposals are not introduced into a contextless environment.

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