Understanding the Rise of the Regulatory State in the Global South

This is a working paper intended as the framing paper for a workshop on the rise of the regulatory state in the Global South. The paper, and the broader workshop, explore whether, and how, the rise of the regulatory state in the Global South, and its implications for processes of governance, are distinct from cases in the North. With the exception of a small but growing body of work on Latin America, most work on the regulatory state deals with the US or Europe, or takes a relatively undifferentiated ‘legal transplant’ approach to the developing world. Our focus is on regulatory agencies as a particular expression of the regulatory state, though we acknowledge that the two are by no means synonymous. We take seriously the historical legacy of the idea of a North/South divide while also integrating the considerable changes occurring topically in this purported divide (caused by increased economic integration between North and South and increased differentiation within the South). Three entry points into exploring the distinctive nature of the regulatory state in the Global South are discussed. First, is there a distinctive genesis of regulatory agencies in developing countries? Second, to what extent and how is the regulatory state of the South shaped by the interface between the domestic and the international? Third, how does the practice of regulation and the political opportunities afforded by state-society interactions in regulatory agencies shape regulatory outcomes on the ground, particularly in relation to the much higher (in comparison to industrialised countries) levels of unserved citizens and informal service providers? The paper draws briefly on a series of comparative case studies of infrastructure regulators (electricity, water, and telecoms) drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America. These case studies have been written up but are still in draft form and will be further integrated into the next version of the paper, with the aim of drawing out common themes that characterize a “regulatory state of the South,” while remaining sensitive to the variations in level of economic development and political institutional contexts within ‘the South’