Building distributed regulation: A new approach to decentralized regulatory governance.

摘要

Distributed regulation is a mechanism of regulatory governance characterized by three main features: (a) it brings policy and implementation closer together under the responsibility of the same group of actors, (b) it embraces flexibility, variance and adaptation to changing conditions, (c) it set goals, priorities and standards for measuring performance in a collaborative way that includes agencies at different levels of government.;Distributed regulation has emerged from a synthesis of two opposing tendencies, centralization of regulatory programs and the growing push toward devolution by the states. Distributed regulation requires an important investment in collaboration and hence is expensive. Only through improvements in information technology have these costs shrunk enough to make distributed regulation feasible as a mechanism of governance.;The National Environmental Performance Partnership System and the One Stop Reporting Program are two examples of federal initiatives that are applying some of the tenets of distributed regulation. Through these programs state and federal agencies are collaborating and participating in all three stages of policy formation, namely: strategy, implementation and evaluation.