Theorizing Regulatory Governance Within Its Ecology : The Structure of Management in an Age of Globalization

This paper examines regulatory governance within its own ecology. It considers regulatory governance as an ideology of governance, as its own set of techniques to that end, as a methodology and psychology of the relations of regulatory organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. The object is to seek to chart the structures and modalities of this ecology to understand the character that makes it both coherent (singularly as the method of regulating a field, and in the aggregate, as a means of structuring regulation as an exercise of ordering power). After a brief introduction, the essay identifies the ecology within which regulatory governance arises. The context is Bangladesh and global supply chains in the garment sector. The paper then seeks to theorize the meta structures of regulatory governance within this ecology. Part II identifies the ecology within which regulatory governance arises. Section A develops a conceptual framework for approaching ecologies of regulatory governance within the specific structures of good governance as an objective and technique of regulatory governance. Here is an ecology that is built on the coordination and conflict among law systems, soft and hard moral systems, disclosure and assessment regimes and their institutional sources in enterprises, international organizations, civil society, and the state. Section B focuses on the context — global garment supply chains as a complex interweaving governance of public, private, national and multilateral institutions. This context is usefully exposed through a flashpoint event — the collapse of the Bangladesh Rana Plaza factory building killing thousands. Part III then seeks to extract theory from the meta structures of regulatory governance and the caveats that follow from the effort. It points to a distinction to be made between the functioning of the ecology and its ideology, and suggests another complex interweaving of moral obligation and law, of structures of disclosure and market driven regulatory discipline, and of the regulatory effects of states in markets as both managers