The New Anticipatory Governance Culture for Innovation: Regulatory Foresight, Regulatory Experimentation and Regulatory Learning
This work targets policymakers and scholars in innovation policy, offering a framework to enhance regulatory adaptability, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tools without introducing a fundamentally new paradigm.
The article addresses the problem of regulatory lag in the face of rapid technological innovation, arguing for the integration of tools like strategic foresight, regulatory sandboxes, and bottom-up approaches to build a more agile and robust anticipatory governance culture in the European Union.
With the rapid pace of technological innovation, traditional methods of policy formation and legislating are becoming conspicuously anachronistic. The need for regulatory choices to be made to counter the deadening effect of regulatory lag is more important to developing markets and fostering growth than achieving one off regulatory perfection. This article advances scholarship on innovation policy and the regulation of technological innovation in the European Union. It does so by considering what building an agile yet robust anticipatory governance regulatory culture involves. It systematically excavates a variety of tools and elements that are being put into use in inventive ways and argues that these need to be more cohesively and systemically integrated into the regulatory toolbox. Approaches covered include strategic foresight, the critical embrace of iterative policy development and regulatory learning in the face of uncertainty and the embrace of bottom up approaches to cocreation of policy such as Policy Labs and the testing and regulatory learning through pilot regulation and experimentation. The growing use of regulatory sandboxes as an EU policy tool to boost innovation and navigate regulatory complexity as seen in the EU AI Act is also probed