The New Anticipatory Governance Culture for Innovation: Regulatory Foresight, Regulatory Experimentation and Regulatory Learning

TL;DR

This paper explores how the European Union is developing an agile, anticipatory regulatory culture by integrating foresight, experimentation, and learning tools to better foster innovation amidst rapid technological change.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes innovative regulatory tools like foresight, policy labs, and sandboxes, emphasizing their integration into a cohesive EU regulatory framework for innovation.

Findings

Regulatory sandboxes are increasingly used in the EU, exemplified by the EU AI Act.

Iterative policy development enhances adaptability to technological uncertainty.

Cohesive integration of foresight and experimentation tools improves regulatory agility.

Abstract

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