1 Published in 2001 (54) Current Legal Problems 103-147 Decentring Regulation: Understanding the Role of Regulation and Self Regulation in a ‘Post- Regulatory’ World Julia Black Introduction This paper is not the one I had intended to write. Rather it is the paper I found I had to write before I could start the one I had intended. The original intention had been to look at trends in recent regulatory policies and academic literature and to ask whether and to what extent regulation was being ‘decentred’ using examples of varieties of regulation which go under the label ‘self regulation’, including the role of, for example, technical committees, epistemic communities, or ‘webs of influence’ in regulating. However in trying to address that empirical issue, I needed to know what it was I was looking for, and how I would know when I had found it. In other words, I needed to answer three basic analytical questions: what is ‘decentring regulation’, what is ‘self regulation’ and how does it fit in the decentring analysis, and what meaning is given to ‘regulation’ to allow it analytically to be ‘decentred’ - how do we know ‘decentred regulation’ when we see it? The answers were not transparent, and so this paper is an attempt to find them. Decentring is a term which is often used to encompass a number of notions, and has both positive and normative dimensions. It is used to express the observation that governments do not, and proposition that they should not, have a monopoly on regulation and that regulation is occurring within and between other social actors, for example large organisations, collective associations, technical committees, professions etc, all without the government’s involvement or indeed formal approval: there is ‘regulation in many rooms’. Decentring is also used to describe changes occurring within government and administration: the internal fragmentation of the tasks of policy formation and implementation. Decentring is further used to express the observation (and less so the normative goal) that governments are constrained in their actions, and that they are as much acted upon as they are actors. Decentring is thus part of the globalisation debate on the one hand, and of the debate on the developments of mezzo-levels of government (regionalism, devolution, federalism) on the other. Decentring is also used in a positive sense to describe the consequence of a particular analysis of social systems, in which politics and administration are, like law or economics, are described as being self referentially closed sub-systems of society, incapable of observing other systems except through their own distorted lenses; decentring is thus the removal of government and administration