Twenty years of responsive regulation: An appreciation and appraisal

Parker, Christine

doi:10.1111/rego.12006

Cited by 69 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Braithwaite 2013). Regulators have struggled to implement the pyramid responsively (Mascini 2013), focusing mainly on enforcement and sanctioning strategies (Mascini 2013;Parker 2013). This underemphasizes the potential for proactive local innovation and improvement, illustrated in Braithwaite et al's (2007) overview of the benefits of creative space in advocating for the elderly.…”

Section: Transcending Top-down Deterrence and Bottom-up Persuasive Rementioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid Healthcare Governance for Improvement? Combining Top‐down and Bottom‐up Approaches to Public Sector Regulation

McDermott

Hamel

Steel³

et al. 2015

Public Administration

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Improving healthcare governance is an enduring challenge for policy-makers. We consider two national healthcare regulators adopting novel 'hybrid' regulatory control strategies in pursuit of improvement. Hybrids combine elements usually found separately. Scotland's and Ireland's regulators combine: (1) top-down formal regulatory mechanisms deterring breaches of protocol and enacting penalties where they occur (e.g. standard-setting, monitoring, accountability); and (2) bottom-up capacity building and persuasive encouragement of adherence to guidance by professional self-determination, implementation, and improvement support (e.g. training, stimulating interventions). We identify socio-historical contextual factors constraining and enabling regulatory hybridity, whether and how it can be re-created, and circumstances when the approaches might be delivered separately. Using our findings, we develop a goal-oriented governance framework illustrating distinct, yet complementary, national and local organizational roles: (1) ensuring the adoption and implementation of best practice, (2) enabling and (3) empowering staff to adapt and add to national mandates, and (4) embedding cultures of improvement.

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Section: Transcending Top-down Deterrence and Bottom-up Persuasive Rementioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid Healthcare Governance for Improvement? Combining Top‐down and Bottom‐up Approaches to Public Sector Regulation

McDermott

Hamel

Steel³

et al. 2015

Public Administration

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…"Responsive Regulation was, quite explicitly intended to be a decisive intervention in favor of a 'third alternative' to both the free market and government regulation in a political economic environment where the notion of regulation had come under threat from the neoliberal policies of Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and the Washington Consensus" (Parker 2013). With a model of enforcement relying on both persuasion and sanction, deployed through various stages of negotiation orchestrated with a cost-benefit/deterrence calculus, Responsive Regulation was meant, according to its authors, to be a recommendation for dynamic policy worked out in practice, on the ground, rather than a single recipe for successful regulation.…”

Section: Conventional Accounts Of Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With a model of enforcement relying on both persuasion and sanction, deployed through various stages of negotiation orchestrated with a cost-benefit/deterrence calculus, Responsive Regulation was meant, according to its authors, to be a recommendation for dynamic policy worked out in practice, on the ground, rather than a single recipe for successful regulation. Responsive Regulation offered "a pragmatic understanding of how regulatory discretion is and can be deployed in the everyday practices of real regulators" combined with a "savvy political understanding of how to make the idea of regulation politically palatable in a neoliberal age" (Parker 2013). In large part, Responsive Regulation was more normative than empirical, assuming without demonstrating that the 4 conditions for pragmatic, deliberative and collaborative regulation already existed, ready to be mobilized to serve the interests of the public writ large, citizens, firms, and government.…”

Section: Conventional Accounts Of Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational Challenges to Regulatory Enforcement and Compliance

Silbey¹

2013

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Scie

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“…Ayers and Braithwaite (1992) themselves made a decisive intervention in this debate with their theory of 'responsive regulation'; a theory which continues to have a powerful influence on regulatory thought and practice today (Parker, 2013). They put forward this theory as a way of integrating voluntary compliance and enforcement methodologies-or, in their own words, for 'establish[ing] a synergy between punishment and persuasion' (Ayres & Braithwaite, 1992, p. 25).…”

Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In some ways, deploying the demotic gaze to determine what is 'reasonable' in compliance decision making makes for a more responsive and less paternalistic and unforgiving mode of governing than the bureaucratic or legalistic modes that prevailed in the past (Kagan 2007;Parker 2013 The process of investigating and enforcing-and not enforcing-municipal rules about noises and other disturbances clearly has the unintended effect of creating differentiated forms of local citizenship. The differentiation is not a direct effect of class and race privilege, since all citizens who persist in calling the local councillor will likely get their complaints at least investigated, if not pursued further; but political capital, while not directly proportional in any mathematical sense to wealth and other sources of privilege, is not unconnected to the usual sources of social inequality.…”

Section: Cultural Assumptions and Customer Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

Clarke¹

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The drive to instil 'customer focus' in government services has always been controversial. However, it is particularly controversial when adopted in services that have compliance functions, such as regulatory bodies, the police and some welfare agencies. The reason for this is that, whereas customer focus discourse prescribes that public services tailor their offerings to the preferences of individual service users, compliance-oriented services produce public goods (order, safety, etc.) by compelling individuals to do/stop doing certain things regardless of their preferences. There is, therefore, a prima facie tension between customer focus discourse and the objectives and practices of compliance, and this raises important questions about why and how customer focus is adopted in compliance-oriented services, and what the consequences of this are.This thesis addresses these questions by investigating the adoption of customer focus policies in the compliance branch of an Australian city council. It is informed by a conceptual framework derived from the governmentality studies literature, where numerous theoretical resources exist for examining how styles of thinking, such as customer focus, shape, and are shaped by, practices for governing the conduct of political subjects. In particular, I draw on the theoretical and methodological insights of a number of recent governmentality studies that examine governing at the level of situated practices as well as, or instead of, at the level of widespread discourses or political rationalities. The rationale for attending to situated practices is to grasp how discourses like customer focus are mobilised by situated actors to address problems emerging in particular governmental contexts, such as urban governance.It is also to facilitate analysis of how heterogeneous discourses and practices, such as customer focus and compliance, are assembled together and how tensions between them are managed on the ground.The thesis presents data collected through ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted with the compliance branch of the city council mentioned above. An ethnographic approach was adopted because it best aligned with my theoretical orientation to study governing at the level of situated practices. Adopting an ethnographic approach allowed me to observe firsthand how customer focus discourse is integrated with compliance practices in the day-to-day operations of urban governance.It also allowed me to overcome some of the limitations associated with the reliance on textual analysis of archival materials in governmentality studies, such as the tendency to infer the operation and effects of governing practices from how they are represented in programmatic texts.Previous research has foregrounded the tensions that arise when customer focus is adopted in compliance-oriented public services and has warned that these tensions risk undermining the public interest outcomes that compliance services produce. The findings presented in this thesis contributes to this literature by...

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Twenty years of responsive regulation: An appreciation and appraisal

Cited by 69 publications

References 52 publications

Hybrid Healthcare Governance for Improvement? Combining Top‐down and Bottom‐up Approaches to Public Sector Regulation

Hybrid Healthcare Governance for Improvement? Combining Top‐down and Bottom‐up Approaches to Public Sector Regulation

Organizational Challenges to Regulatory Enforcement and Compliance

Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

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