The long, but promising, road from deterrence to networked enforcement

Regulatory enforcement as a practice, and how political scientists, regulatory scholars and lawyers think about it, has changed considerably since the 1980s. For a long time, practitioners and scholars have sought to improve the effectiveness of regulatory enforcement without sacrificing other democratic values such as accountability and transparency. This chapter maps the evolution of regulatory enforcement literature by discussing some of the steps taken on the long, but promising, road that practitioners and scholars have travelled: from deterrence-based strategies to compliance-based strategies, and from enforced self-regulation first to responsive regulation and then on to smart regulation and beyond. The chapter concentrates in particular on the opportunities and constraints of what is the current state-of-the-art practice and theory on regulatory enforcement: networked enforcement. The chapter argues that whilst scholarship on regulatory enforcement has made some impressive advances, the ‘perfect’ regulatory enforcement model has not yet been uncovered. It concludes by reflecting on some of the key questions that scholars may wish to take up in future research on regulatory enforcement.