Regulation That Works: Transforming the Future of Regulatory Spaces

This book explains what regulation is – and is not.

It clarifies how regulation actually works, and how it can be made better. It also sets out how regulation should be done given fundamental challenges and changes to how we have done it. What is regulation trying to achieve? Is there too much red tape? Does regulation impede growth and innovation? Does regulation provide protection, and stability, and fair behaviours? Is it effective? How do we know if it succeeds?

The book illustrates competing regulatory models, and how multiple tools work – but also how things need to work differently in the future.

Given the pace of change in new technologies, creating unknown and uncontrollable risks, and the global nature of these technologies, we can only keep ourselves safe if we modernise how we 'do' regulation and work in collaborative ecosystems in which everyone works together to identify and control new harms. We should be aiming to achieve multiple outcomes, including protection as well as fair markets, facilitating innovation, and economic growth and social cohesion.

The book elucidates how this is all possible – if we organise ourselves and behave in new ways. Examples show sectors where all of this is already being applied – in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK.

This is a revolutionary book, and a must-read for anyone who wants to effect change in their regulatory spaces.

Christopher Hodges OBE is Emeritus Professor of Justice Systems at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford, UK; Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK; and Chair of the Regulatory Horizons Council, UK.

Photo courtesy of Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.