Principal Investigator: Professor Walter Mattli

Regulation, once largely a domestic public matter, has tremendously grown in complexity and scope with the onset of globalization. This transformation of rule-making processes and governance structures, which is affecting practically all areas of human activity, has emerged as one of the most central and fascinating topics in world politics. The overarching goal of my project is to better understand the nature of the emerging global economic governance through careful analyses of the regulatory trends and institutional changes in key areas of global governance. In other words, the project seeks to better understand the nature of what has been called the globalized regulatory state by disaggregating this state into key constitutive parts and reflecting on differences across these parts in structure, process, and outcome. The main substantive focus of my analysis will be on two central areas of global economic governance where good social scientific investigation is particularly scarce: regulation of food and transport (sea, air, and road).

The project is funded by the British Academy.