Making change happen: reforming innappropriate and restrictive regulatory frameworks
Abstract
The process of regulatory change has generally not been extensively documented, or at least not in one single document or source of information. The information presented in the literature has tended to focus on making the case for changing regulatory processes for settlement development, or a discussion of what needs to change. Many processes of change can be considered as top-down, when the government or another institution has recognised the failures of existing regulatory systems and introduced regulatory reforms, or bottom-up, when communities, sometimes in collaboration with NGOs, have largely developed their own informal regulatory processes in the absence of appropriate official regulatory systems and processes to govern the development of their settlements. Generally, little evidence was provided of participatory development of regulations through genuine and long-term partnerships between the government and local authorities on the one hand, and civil society on the other. In cases where there is some collaboration between the public sector and civil society, and in some cases also including private sector organisations such as utility service providers, this mostly involves development of largely unwritten and informal rules for addressing particular issues or problems through negotiation and compromise. Brief case studies are presented to illustrate the issues of regulatory reform.
Citation
Paper presented at the Third RGUU International Workshop held 22-24 September 2003, Leamington, UK, 31 pp.
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