How regulators can deal with political, social and technological disruption: a conversation with Professor Cary Coglianese

The ANZSOG-auspiced National Regulators Community of Practice will again bring regulators from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand together for its 2025 National Conference – Regulation 2025 to 2050: Disruption, Change and Continuity from August 27-28 in Brisbane. The conference will give regulators a chance to come together in a time of turbulence and uncertainty, and explore their common challenges. 

Professor Cary Coglianese, Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science; Director, Penn Program on Regulation, University of Pennsylvania, will be one of the international keynote speakers at the Conference, sharing his expertise and giving a global perspective on regulatory issues. 

In this interview he talks about the challenges ahead, the threats and opportunities of AI, building and maintaining trust and the value of bringing regulators from different sectors together. 

Professor Coglianese, what do you foresee as the main challenges for regulators over the next 25 years? 

We can see, both today and in the decades to come, at least four major streams of intersecting challenges that regulators need to confront. 

One set of challenges is derived from a changing planetary climate. This is not just an issue for environmental regulators. Climate change poses a series of new challenges for regulators of all stripes. For example, infrastructure around the world is under stress because of climate change, and this poses new or heightened challenges for transportation, utilities, and building regulators. Climate change also poses challenges for financial regulators, insurance, and banking regulators as these sectors face increased stressors due to an increasing frequency and severity of disasters. Across the board, climate change poses threats to economic stability and the efficacy of societies’ systems of risk management that have been in place for decades. 

A second set of challenges derives from rapidly evolving technology. These challenges are best reflected in the advances we are seeing in artificial intelligence. But we’re also seeing challenges due to advances in material sciences, genetics, and digital technology more broadly. New technologies bring with them the potential for substantial new benefits for society. But they can also bring with them a host of new risks and problems for regulators to address. 

A third set of challenges comprises what I would call socio-political challenges. We have declining public trust in government occurring around the world. Public trust has also dropped in experts and in all sorts of important public and private sector institutions that have been pivotal to economic growth and public welfare. A couple of key implications for regulators follow from this decline in public trust. For one thing, it means that regulators can find themselves in a trust paradox:  the public can demand more regulation of private sector institutions because they trust them less, but at the same time they also are less trusting of regulators and the experts that make regulatory decisions. 

Another implication of the decline in public trust is that it can be – and too often is – exploited by political leaders who make populist appeals aimed at undercutting existing governing institutions. In some countries, leaders have made regulation a scapegoat for unfavourable economic or social conditions.  

All in all, these socio-political challenges are substantial. The world of regulation once might have been a sleepy, technocratic backwater where a few engineers from government could meet with and talk with engineers from industry and solve problems and work things out. But that is increasingly no longer the case. 

This all leads to a fourth and final set of challenges: institutional changes. In part because of changing socio-political dynamics, we’re seeing governments and legal systems transforming from what had been a relatively stable set of institutions in the post-World War II era. Legal changes on the global, national, regional and local levels are common and often substantial. Regulators increasingly find themselves operating within a changing set of institutional norms and institutional structures. 

Altogether, these four sets of challenges are also intersecting with each other, often in unpredictable ways. So, we are heading into, or are already in, a period of disequilibrium along a number of key dimensions that are affecting what regulators do. The regulator’s task in the past could have been compared to traversing a rocky trail. But today it is much more like surfing: trying to keep on top of the crest of a very rapidly changing and sometimes ferocious wave, when we don’t know exactly where the wave is heading.  

How can regulators adapt to this environment? What kind of skills do they need, or what do they do differently, to address these challenges and defend their work and its value?  

Well, it’s not going to be easy. I always refer to the title of a book on leadership by a former colleague of mine at Harvard: ‘Leadership Without Easy Answers.’ I think there might well be need for a book these days called ‘Regulation Without Easy Answers.’   

That said, the fundamentals of regulatory excellence are critical to keep in mind during these times. Regulators need to make sure that they’re maintaining the utmost integrity, stellar confidence, and empathic engagement. These qualities have always been important, but they are even more so today, when the work of regulators is in the public eye more than ever before. Regulators need to remember the core precepts of regulatory excellence and keep striving to pursue them.  

We’re also entering a world in which technology will be playing a different and important role in regulation, performing new tasks for regulators just as for other professionals. Using AI tools responsibly and effectively will be essential.  

Fundamentally, though, regulatory excellence in the years ahead will come down to people excellence – even, and especially, with technological advances. The trail toward regulatory quality will be much steeper and more exposed than before, and so regulators have to make sure they’re moving up the mountain with the best training and best talent that they possibly can have.  

Talking of technology, what are the kind of key threats and opportunities that are coming from AI? And what can regulators do at the organisational level to improve their use of AI? 

First of all, AI is not something that’s a singular technology. It comes in so many different varieties that there can’t be a one-size-fits-all answer to the issues AI presents for society. In general, though, we can see that AI is creating new challenges for regulators simply because it’s transforming the industries they’re regulating. AI is being used in medical devices, transit systems, robotics of all kinds. We have it in medical screening, telecommunications, energy, and more. And we have it in new realms that didn’t exist 15, 20 years ago, such as social media and e-commerce. 

Changing technology has always been an issue for regulators, but AI is a particularly difficult arena of technological change to oversee because, again, it’s not a singular technology, but a suite of technologies. The algorithms are changing and being trained on new data. And the uses to which AI is being put is also expansive and changing.  

On the other hand, as much as AI is creating new challenges for regulators, it also holds a lot of potential for governments and regulators to do their jobs better. AI can be used to help triage limited enforcement and inspection resources. It may even replace some humans for overseeing certain complex systems.  

So, in short, there are both new risks to society from AI that will land on the laps of regulators, but also new opportunities for regulators to improve and become more efficient and effective at what they’re doing through the use of AI. 

You’ve spoken  about the difficulties of maintaining trust. Is there anything regulators can do either to restore trust or change the way they operate in this low trust environment?  

They probably can’t do this all by themselves – because the decline in trust is a systemic phenomenon that’s affecting institutions of all kinds, in all parts of the world. But I do think that there is good evidence to show that transparency and effective communication are really important for regulators to use to build confidence and help secure compliance. The relationship between trust and compliance is vital because we have to keep in mind that, in many realms, regulatory compliance is functionally close to voluntary, simply because regulators can’t be everywhere. 

When regulators are transparent, and when they allow for people to participate in the making of rules or setting of policies, they help people become more trusting and accepting of regulations that are imposed upon them. These are all tried and true methods. 

Regulators also need to be at the top of their own game. They need to make sure that rules are optimally designed, that they’re not overbroad, that they’re not being deployed in a manner that’s excessively burdensome. Regulators can’t back away from demanding the kind of behavioural change needed to solve regulatory problems, but they need more than ever to do so in a manner that treats regulated entities and the broader public with respect and dignity. Listening is absolutely essential. 

How should regulators try to manage a more partisan or more politicised environment, as is happening in the USA at the moment?  

Again, no easy answers. It’s ironic that, in this environment, at the same time that regulators need to be communicating more to build trust, they also have to be careful not to put themselves out as a target. 

I think humility is important, as is being available to hear what members of the public, a true cross-section of the public, have to say. Having the utmost integrity is also essential. Regulators need to showing folks on both sides of the ideological spectrum that they’re a straight shooter and not trying to play favourites. These might well seem like obvious or even seemingly simple things, but they’re fundamental. 

Keep in mind, too, that in the United States our top-level leaders of regulatory agencies are themselves partisan, so folks at a level or two below may have to implement and manage for regulatory excellence in the face of, at times, illegitimate partisan pressures from above. But ultimately, those down at lower levels of the regulatory organisation are crucial to making sure that banks are not failing, that planes are not crashing, and that air is clean and water is safe to drink. Folks at every level need to play it straight while doing their jobs and keeping the public foremost in mind. The majority of regulatory officials and staffs are doing that on a daily basis in the United States. But we have real challenges right now because a large segment of the public no longer accepts expertise and neutrality as even possible. 

With the challenges facing regulators, what role can forums like NRCoP as an institution and its annual conferences perform? 

One thing that I have learned through my three decades working on regulatory issues is that, despite the siloing that exists across different regulatory domains, and despite the very discrete and distinctive challenges that regulators in different domains face, at a core level regulating in any domain is the same: it’s an enterprise that’s all about trying to shape human behaviour toward socially optimal outcomes. Regulators can really benefit from coming together and sharing how they are dealing with this same basic challenge. Sometimes this means sharing best practices that are analytical, such as how regulators figure out how to optimise scarce oversight resources. Sometimes this means learning more about relational skills, such as ways to be more effective in building trust.  

Too many people in regulatory agencies are missing opportunities to learn from each other, within and across organisations, because they don’t have enough forums for exchange and mutual learning. What the NRCoP is doing is absolutely vital because there is a real profession that benefits from ongoing learning—a regulatory profession that has a common set of challenges, skills, and opportunities. Even though regulation becomes so specialised in each sector it touches, we’ve not always recognised that there still exists a need for a common core of educational and professional development. Members of the public are depending on regulators to be at the top of their game. 

The NRCoP 2025 National Conference – Regulation 2025 to 2050: Disruption, Change and Continuity will be held on 27-28 August 2025 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, Meanjin Brisbane. 

Registrations for the Conference are now open. 

The 2025 conference will be delivered in-person, with a virtual option giving access to live-streamed plenary sessions. An optional Conference Dinner will be held on the evening of Wednesday, 27 August 2025 from 7:00PM to 10:30PM in the Whale Mall at the Queensland Museum.