Meta-Regulation in Practice: Beyond Normative Views of Morality and Rationality

Meta-regulation presents itself as a progressive policy approach that can manage complexity and conflicting objectives better than traditional command and control regulation. It does this by ‘harnessing’ markets and enlisting a broad range of stakeholders to reach a more inclusive view of the public interest that a self-regulating business can then respond to.

Based on a seventeen year study of the Australian energy industry, and via the lens of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, Meta-Regulati...