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Lodge, Martin --- "Back to the Future? Regulatory Innovation and the Railways in Britain and Germany" [2005] ELECD 360; in Black, Julia; Lodge, Martin; Thatcher, Mark (eds), "Regulatory Innovation" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: Regulatory Innovation

Editor(s): Black, Julia; Lodge, Martin; Thatcher, Mark

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845422844

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Back to the Future? Regulatory Innovation and the Railways in Britain and Germany

Author(s): Lodge, Martin

Number of pages: 26

Extract:

4. Back to the future? Regulatory
innovation and the railways in
Britain and Germany
Martin Lodge

INTRODUCTION

Regulatory innovation is said to emerge from interaction with, and the influ-
ence of, often contradictory internal and environmental pressures (see Julia
Black's introductory chapter; also D'Aunno et al. 1991; Thelen 1999; Thelen
2003, p. 211). Why are some pressures more important than others when it
comes to the selection of policy templates as part of regulatory innovation?
What type of standard operating procedures shape the way in which policy
templates are selected, and how? Does the selection of policy templates point
to a `back to the future' effect in that there are noticeable continuities and
proposals that continuously reappear or is there a linear progression of policy
adjustment (see Abrahamson 1991)?
The diverse worlds of regulatory innovation have addressed these questions
in a number of ways. This chapter draws on core arguments from three worlds
of regulatory innovation and explores these claims by charting regulatory
innovation in terms of institutional design in railways in two countries, Britain
and Germany, at three distinctly critical historical junctures in the twentieth
century: the age of the first attempts at nationalization in the post-First World
War period, the age of the `positive state' after the Second World War and the
supposed age of the `regulatory state' in the 1990s.
Railways are the 3G equivalent of the nineteenth century. They have been
at the forefront of regulatory developments since the early-to-mid nineteenth
...