Captured by technology? How material agency sustains interaction between regulators and industry actors

• Published in: Research policy 2017-02, Vol.46 (1), p.160-170
• Main Authors: Finch, John, Geiger, Susi, Reid, Emma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Incremental innovation; Material agency; Precautionary principle; Regulatory capture; Socio-economic interaction; Technological capture
• ISSN: 0048-7333; 1873-7625
• DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2016.08.002

•We study the relationship between regulation and innovation framed as a process.•Our focus is on environmental regulation for which products remain in circulation.•Processes are made stable in time through regulators’ and producers’ interactions.•We demonstrate a weak form of technological capture, supported by material agency.•Regulatory principles are mediated operationally by norms, including applied science. This paper examines how environmental regulation is made operational when it legislates for modifications rather than the banning of products or substances. The continued circulation of such products draws attention to the heterogeneous conditions of their use and allows industry actors to accumulate evidence of the products’ polluting effects over time. We find that this agentic quality of materials – including products and sites of application – is a vital and so far largely ignored dimension in the relationship between environmental regulation and innovation. This is captured in a process we term interactive stabilization, which describes how material agency becomes a focus for interactions between regulatory and industry actors. We develop our argument through an in-depth case study of the environmental regulation of production chemistry and identify three interactive processes: formulating regulatory principles; operationalizing these principles through technical documentation and calculation; and incremental innovation as used by chemists to address clients’ varied material problems in production. We trace stabilizing and destabilizing effects across these three processes and draw particular attention to the role of uncertainty in the operationalization of precaution as a regulatory principle. We argue that this uncertainty may lead to a form of regulatory capture that we frame as technological capture. This refers to how industry actors are able to test the limits of regulatory principles and calculations and on occasion contest these through their applied science capabilities.