Publications

The Guidelines offer a comprehensive toolkit for policy- and lawmakers on how to improve their legislative process to tackle contemporary lawmaking challenges head-on and to promote more openness, transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and participation at all stages of the legislative cycle. The Guidelines are an effective instrument to ensure that lawmaking processes and adopted legislation are human rights-compliant, accessible, non-discriminatory, gender-responsive and sensitive to the needs of diverse social groups. The Guidelines also emphasize the fundamental role that non-governmental organizations play throughout the lawmaking process and can serve as an advocacy tool for civil society to ensure that the people affected by legislation are informed about, and have a say in shaping its contents. It is our hope that these Guidelines will be a useful source of information and will provide users with practical, hands-on advice on how to reform their legislative rules and practices in compliance with international human rights and rule of law standards and OSCE commitments, leading to better-quality laws. Their ultimate goal is to empower decision makers to develop legislation that truly serves the people.

Grand challenges are shaping twenty-first-century politics. Threats connected to health, climate, demographics and welfare are increasingly intruding on the lives of citizens. Still, governments are often found off-guard, and policymakers need strategies grounded in longer-term perspectives. Strategic foresight (SF) helps us to design and shape policies to prepare to withstand shocks, anticipating and adapting to changes. However, as governments work towards embedding SF into their policymaking processes, the empirical evidence suggests that applications are still piecemeal and predominantly limited to the agenda-settings and policy formulation stages. In this article, we argue that to drive anticipatory governance, foresight needs to be applied at all stages of the policy cycle, including in evaluating policies to draw lessons for future interventions. We maintain that considering SF systemically throughout the policymaking cycle, from agenda setting to evaluation, strengthens anticipatory governance.

Il numero di ottobre della Rassegna trimestrale dell'Osservatorio AIR propone analisi sullo sviluppo di diversi strumenti della qualità della regolazione, sia relativamente alla metodologia, sia relativamente alla loro attuazione. Nei primi tre contributi si commentano altrettante recenti analisi OCSE su tre rilevanti strumenti: il test PMI, le consultazioni e le sandboxes. Nei restanti due commenti ci si concentra sull'aspetto attuativo, con un contributo di analisi sullo stato dell'arte dell'AIR e della VIR a livello nazionale (con un commento alla Relazione annuale del DAGL al Parlamento sull'applicazione di AIR e VIR) e sulla sperimentazione che il Friuli-Venezia Giulia ha effettuato in tema di enforcement, relativamente ai controlli nel settore lattiero-caseario.

In Republican and Democratic administrations, regulatory and funding decisions have both been made with close reference to benefit-cost analysis (BCA). With respect to regulation, there has been a great deal of scholarly discussion of BCA and its limits, but almost no attention has been paid to the role of BCA in government funding. That is a serious gap, not least in connection with climate-related risks, such as wildfire, drought, extreme heat, and flooding. In OMB Circular A-94, the Office of Management and Budget has long required applicants for federal funding to demonstrate that the benefits of their projects would exceed the costs. Under Circular A-94, efficiency-based BCA can produce results that fail to maximize welfare and that are also highly inequitable. The 2023 draft revision of Circular A-94, focused on welfare and equity, reflects an effort to incorporate new academic thinking over the past three decades, which is now—not uncontroversially—being brought directly into policy. At the same time, the new draft Circular A-94 raises fresh questions about how best to promote welfare, and to consider equity, in practice. Pressing issues involve the use of distributional weights in funding decisions and also the use of averages across populations, which might be seen as a form of distributional weighting. More broadly, the trajectory of this benefit-cost guidance, which predates the guidance for regulation and originally covered regulation, helps uncover the logic under which BCA has been operating and deeper challenges and tensions within BCA, in the past and going forward.

The 2024 Commission Work Programme, adopted on 17 October 2023, puts a strong focus on simplifying rules for citizens and businesses across the European Union. This follows up on President von der Leyen’s commitment to reduce reporting requirements by 25%, in line with our strategy to boost the EU’s long-term competitiveness and to provide relief for SMEs.

This interim Report examines the factors behind recent AI developments, highlights the benefits offered by the technology, and identifies a series of challenges for policymakers. It is examined how the UK Government has responded, and how this compares to other countries and jurisdictions.