The world of regulatory institutions has been in a state of flux for the last two decades, and valuable lessons can be learned from a comparative focus on the nature and causes of institutional change and reform in the regulatory agencies and institutions of United States, Canada and Great Britain.

The contributing authors, mainly political scientists and legal scholars but also practicing regulators, make the case for a much broader conceptual view of regulation; that it is increasingly necessary for key regulatory interests - business and consumers - to understand regulation in terms of an interplay among four regions: sectoral, framework, intra-cabinet and international. They also explore inter-regime regulatory institutional relations through case studies to demonstrate how regulatory institutions respond to competing regulatory requirements, and to tensions between sectoral utility regulators and competition and environmental regulators.

Other key comparisons are drawn out, such as the independence and autonomy of regulators, implementation, economic governance and different paths towards reform. The essential contrast between the three nations studied shows that institutional change in the UK has been explicitly structural, and that a new "regulatory state" has been more openly and fully rediscovered in that country, while change within a federal structure such as exists in the US and Canada has tended to remain more intra-governmental.

The book seeks to provide students of regulation with a work that focuses on the political and institutional that they can place alongside examinations of the economic and legal perspectives.

G. Bruce Doern is a professor emeritus in the School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University. He is the author and co-author of numerous books on Canadian politics and policy, including Faith and Fear: The Free Trade Story, with Brian Tomlin, and Canadian Public Policy: Ideas, Structure, Process, with Richard Phidd.

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Stephen Wilks is Professor of Politics at Exeter University

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