Twenty Years of Responsive Regulation: An Appreciation and Appraisal

Abstract

This special issue of Regulation and Governance celebrates and appraises twenty years since the publication of Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite’s Responsive Regulation. This Introduction situates the origins of Responsive Regulation and its vision of transcending the regulation-deregulation debate in the professional biographies of the authors. It goes on to introduce the extensions, critiques and appreciations of responsive regulation offered by the contributors to this special issue by situating them in the rich and ambiguous legacy of Ayres and Braithwaite’s 1992 book. Finally the Introduction points out that the main legacy of responsive regulation is the way it has inspired regulators, social movement advocates and scholars to keep imagining new ways of regulating for the public interest in a context where the boundaries between state, business and civil society is changing so that a predominant reliance on government regulation is no longer seen as legitimate. The Introduction argues that for the future the field of regulatory studies should also include studies that conceptualise and deductively test more specific and particular components of policy oriented theory that might provide the evidence base for responsive regulation, and, importantly, radically inductive critical studies that illuminate the values and interests and power differences that are created by regulation, including regulation inspired by responsive regulation.

Keywords: Responsive regulation, business regulation, John Braithwaite, compliance, enforcement