Abstract
AbstractMost accounts of businesses and regulators depict adversarial relationships. In these accounts, businesses typically seek to avoid or limit public regulation or, alternatively, to distort it so it serves private rather than public ends. This article uses a study of the environmental consulting industry to explore a different set of relationships between businesses and public regulation. These consultants generally work for for‐profit companies, and they serve as regulatory intermediaries between businesses and government. Those dual roles raise concerns that environmental consultants, like many other businesses, will seek to subvert regulatory schemes or will serve as instruments of regulatory capture. While some evidence supports these concerns, interviews and documentary research also demonstrated widespread perceptions that consultants play two other roles. First, environmental consultants strive to operate as trusted facilitators of constructive relationships between regulators and regulated entities. Second, for combined reasons of profit motive and value‐based moral commitments, environmental consultants also strive to act as guardians and proponents of the public values underlying environmental regulation. These roles have implications for descriptive understandings of the functioning of regulatory regimes and for regulatory system design. Most importantly, in contrast to literature emphasizing the need to protect regulatory governance from private, for‐profit entities, these findings illustrate how for‐profit regulatory intermediaries can work to bolster regulatory governance.
Highlights
In academic and popular discourse on business and government regulation, conflict is a persistent theme
The governing legal framework is imbued with public-spirited values – the basic goal of California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), as California courts and regulators have repeatedly noted, is to ensure deliberative, transparent, and environmentally protective public decisions3 – but in practice, private consultants handle much of the work of CEQA compliance
I focused on, and reviewed all available examples of, documents written by industry associations rather than on documents produced under contract with individual clients
Summary
In academic and popular discourse on business and government regulation, conflict is a persistent theme. In a quiet way, and for reasons that include but go beyond economic self-interest, some consultants work to help regulatory regimes advance public values These findings offer two primary contributions to the existing literature on businesses and regulation. They extend prior accounts of regulatory intermediaries by showing that, for commingled reasons of culture and economic incentive, for-profit businesses can self-consciously strive to bolster and advance public regulation. That literature has hardly ever discussed the roles that environmental consultants play By explaining those roles, this account helps flesh out understandings of the ways in which environmental regulation functions and the extent to which regulatory systems involve important roles other than regulated business, regulator, and activist. Observers seeking to understand functional regulatory systems should be alert to this sort of private role, and designers of regulatory systems may want to consider how to foster it
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
