The New Regulatory Space: Reframing Democratic Governance by Frank Vibert

Frank Vibert's book offers a systemic analysis of regulation. It studies systems as a whole and relates regulation to other systems of authority. It offers a rare example of a study that examines both the internal workings of systems and their relationships with other systems. This book analyzes changing patterns of governance in modern democratic societies and discusses how far we should be concerned about such changes. Crucially, Vibert clarifies the status of regulation, revealing how regulation should be viewed, not only as a technique offering specific responses to particular policy problems, but also in its new role as the key mechanism for making adjustments between the different systems of coordination used in contemporary governance. There are three main aims of the first, to clarify the status and role of regulation itself in modern systems of social coordination; second, to identify the key challenges to the integrity of the different systems and how far they can be attributed to the growth of regulation and third to identify what to do to protect the integrity of the different domains against challenge. This work innovates in the use of the concept of the 'regulatory space' to analyze relationships across systems of governance as well as in the utilization of 'social framing' as methods of inquiry into why we regulate. It also breaks new ground in discussing 'accountability' in terms of being able to monitor the changing patterns.