The Structure of Regulation: Explaining Why Regulation Succeeds and Fails

This timely and original book provides an exploration of the factors that combine to determine the form of regulatory problems and the overall success or failure of regulation. Using environmental regulation as a basis for analysis, this book puts forward a theoretical framework for the design of effective regulation and demonstrates how businesses’ compliance with environmental regulation, in particular, could be improved.

The authors address previous shortcomings in regulatory explanations, which have frequently overlooked the structural character of regulation and underplayed how the factors involved work together to determine regulatory shape and performance. In seeking to address this deficit, the authors develop a compliance line to demonstrate how different choices on how to regulate will affect compliance outcomes. Chapters include a review of how regulation has changed and sought to improve over the years, the relationship between rule following and regulation, how regulation incorporates and relies on necessary conditions, an identification of the trade-offs involved in regulating, and a discussion of why regulation is, by necessity and to a degree, unfair.

Providing theories for how regulation can be structured to improve compliance, The Structure of Regulation will be a key resource for students and academics in the fields of law and regulation, environment studies, public policy and political science.

David Williamson, Professor Emeritus, University of Staffordshire and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Law Department, University of Manchester and Gary Lynch-Wood, Senior Lecturer, Law Department, University of Manchester, UK and the City University of Hong Kong