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International
Journal of Regulation and Governance
3(1) June 2003
Regulators, policy-makers,
and the making of policy: who does what and when do they do it?
Ashley Brown
The
formation of independent regulatory agencies for infrastructure has led to considerable
controversy in many countries over the respective roles of government policy-makers and of
‘independent’ regulators. The fact that independent regulatory agencies are
not only new entities, but also new concepts, has contributed to a lack of clarity on
their role in policy formulation. The issue is often characterized as distinguishing
between the setting and implementation of policy. That characterization, however, is
not very useful. For a variety of reasons relating to politics, expertise, inability
to be prescient, transparency, jurisprudence, imprecision in wordsmithing, and finance,
the issue is perhaps better defined in terms of two levels of policy-making, macro and
micro. The former is the domain of government policy-makers, while the latter seems
best suited for regulators. While government always retains the ultimate responsibility
for the formulation of policy, it is best to delegate nuanced policy decisions, micro
policy, to regulators. Doing so makes for less politicization, more predictability, more
transparency, and more informed decision-making.
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