Theory of Regulation - Decentred Regulation

Key Characteristics:

1. The government do not, and proposition that they should not have a monopoly on regulation and that regulation occurring within and between other social actors.

2. It is part of the globalisation debate on the one hand, and of the debate on the developments of mezzo-levels of government (regionalism, devolution, federalism) on the other.

3. It describes the consequence of a particular analysis of social systems, in which politics and administration are, like law and economics, are described as being self referentially closed sub-systems of society, incapable of observing other systems except through their own distorted lenses.

4. It is the removal of government and administration from the conceptual centre of society.

5. It is positively and normatively, to express 'de-apexing': the removal of the state from the conceptual hiearchy of state-society, and the move to a heterarchial relationship in which the roles of governors and governed are both shifting and ill-defined.

6. The themes are reflected in a changed undertsanding of regulation.

Some examples for brain-storming:

- HKSAR vs PRC

- ICAC vs HKSAR