Ideas regarding ‘better regulation’ and ‘high-quality regulation’ have become key aspects of contemporary administrative reform initiatives. What explains the popularity of this agenda? What does the comparative experience tell us about its impact? And what is its future? This article suggests that the contemporary debate is flawed by competing assumptions hiding behind a common language. A more promising approach is to embed high-quality regulation into regulatory conversations rather than imposing requirements through hierarchical means.

Over the last decade the interest in the quality of EU legislative instruments has surged due to serious threats to the effectiveness of the legislation. This contribution makes an inventory of the policies and instruments that have been put into place to improve quality of legislation and assesses their character, orientation and effectiveness. Any appraisal of these policies, so the paper argues, is dependent on a perception of the basic functions attributed to EU legislative instruments and the standards derived from it. The paper concludes that the present policies and instruments for better lawmaking have the ability to promote regulatory quality, but not necessarily overall legislative quality.

Can the European regulatory state be managed? The European Union (EU) and its Member States have looked at Better Regulation as a possible answer to this difficult question. This emerging public policy presents conceptual challenges to scholars of public management and administrative reforms, but also opportunities. In this conceptual article, we start from the problems created by the value-laden discourse used by policy- makers in this area, and provide a definition and a framework that are suitable for empirical/explanatory research. We then show how public administration scholars could usefully bring Better Regulation into their research agendas. To be more specific, we situate Better Regulation in the context of the academic debates on the New Public Management, the political control of bureaucracies, evidence-based policy, and the regulatory state in Europe

The objective of this paper is to introduce the main tools used to manage the flow and the stock of regulation with special attention to those based on economic analysis, their advantages and weak points, the consequences of their use in public sector organization, procedures and, in general, in the relationship between regulators and their targets. Discussion is also devoted to conditions for improving their efficacy, since the tools need to be used selectively, and require an agenda-setting phase as well as periodic retrospective analysis of existing rules as used in the whole regulation life cycle. Therefore, it is crucial to understand what these good regulation tools are really intended for, and to avoid their over or under-evaluation, both of which could be influential in reforms made partially or in name only. At the same time, their limits could incentivize the search for innovative solutions, such as a special attention to the real needs and behaviour of people in the design of new regulation, as well as in its measurement and reform