Cary Coglianese, the director of the Penn Program on Regulation, delivered the opening keynote address at the recently concluded conference of the National Regulators Community of Practice (NRCoP) held in Brisbane, Australia. His address—entitled “From Crisis to Confidence: Navigating Turbulent Times With the Global Push for Regulatory Reform to Boost Efficiency”—focused on how regulators can best respond to the major sources of change and challenge confronting all sectors of the economy.
In remarks offered in an interview in advance of the NRCoP conference, Coglianese emphasized four major sources of turbulence confronting regulators today: environmental, technological, socio-political, and institutional.
“The world of regulation once might have been a sleepy, technocratic backwater where a few engineers from government could meet with and talk with engineers from industry and solve problems and work things out. But that is increasingly no longer the case,” noted Coglianese, who is also the Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Building on his book Achieving Regulatory Excellence, Coglianese emphasized that “the fundamentals of regulatory excellence are critical to keep in mind during these times.” He emphasized that regulatory excellence is not necessarily about more regulation—or less. It is more importantly about regulators’ mindset about their missions and the way they approach the work that they perform.
“Regulators need to make sure that they’re maintaining the utmost integrity, stellar confidence, and empathic engagement. These qualities have always been important, but they are even more so today, when the work of regulators is in the public eye more than ever before. Regulators need to remember the core precepts of regulatory excellence and keep striving to pursue them,” he explained.
In his keynote address at the conference, Coglianese offered three key recommendations for regulators as they work toward regulatory excellence in turbulent times:
1. Be agile. Play like Lionel Messi, who is not the fastest footballer, but is still extremely agile. He spends a surprisingly disproportionate amount of time walking around the center of the pitch, scanning the field before springing into action where needed. There is a good lesson for regulators here: engage in information-gathering and foresight activities. Be aware and ready to shift course when needed.
2. Muster courage. Regulating well is never easy. But in turbulent times, it’s as important as ever for regulators to develop thicker skins, recognizing that their work may seldom be popular. But it’s important to possess humility, too, and to engage with the public even if that seems hard or time-consuming. It’s also essential for each regulator to have a lodestar—a clear conception of their role and mission—and keep focused on ultimate outcomes.
3. Tell your story. There’s an asymmetry in the visibility of regulatory successes and failures. Failures will be evident—as they can unfortunately be all too tragic. But they are not the only regulatory impacts that the public and their elected representatives need to recognize. Regulatory successes will usually be invisible because they add up simply to life as it should be: accidents avoided, financial fraud prevented, and so forth. Regulators should find ways to tell the story of how their work tangibly affects the lives individuals.
Coglianese emphasized the need for regulators to step back and keep perspective on how their work affects the lives of individual members of the public, whether as business owners, consumers, or family members. “The leaders of, and within, regulatory organizations need to remind their workforces and the public of their ultimate goals—that is, of how their work affects people,” he noted in his keynote address. “The mission for every regulatory in any domain surely means putting people at the heart of everything, so parents can feed their families, buy homes or afford rents, or save for their children’s college education—and so that people can live healthy lives and prosper and be safe and secure from harm.”
The NRCoP meets every other year, with this year’s conference bringing together over 700 regulatory officials from across Australia and New Zealand. Coglianese emphasized in his pre-conference interview the value of such gatherings, noting that “regulators can really benefit from coming together and sharing how they are dealing with this same basic challenge. Sometimes this means sharing best practices that are analytical, such as how regulators figure out how to optimize scarce oversight resources. Sometimes this means learning more about relational skills, such as ways to be more effective in building trust.”
“Too many people in regulatory agencies are missing opportunities to learn from each other, within and across organizations, because they don’t have enough forums for exchange and mutual learning,” Coglianese observed.
In addition to delivering the keynote address at the NRCoP conference, Coglianese moderated a plenary conversation at the conference on artificial intelligence and regulation. During his time in the region, he also visited and spoke at multiple additional gatherings of hundreds of other regulators in Wellington, New Zealand, and Melbourne, Australia.
Cary Coglianese, the Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science is the founding Director of the Penn Program on Regulation, which draws together more than 70 faculty and other regulatory scholars from across the University of Pennsylvania. Coglianese specializes in the study of administrative law and regulatory policy, with an emphasis on the design and evaluation of alternative processes and strategies and the role of public participation, technology, and business-government relations in policymaking.
