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Two monkey wrenches in the Russian regulatory reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2021

Vladimir KUDRYAVTSEV Open the ORCID record for Vladimir KUDRYAVTSEV [Opens in a new window] ,
Ruslan KUCHAKOV  and
Daria KUZNETSOVA
Vladimir KUDRYAVTSEV
Affiliation:
Junior Researcher, Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation; email: [email protected].
Ruslan KUCHAKOV
Affiliation:
Junior Researcher, Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation; email: [email protected].
Daria KUZNETSOVA
Affiliation:
Junior Researcher, Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation; email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The latest Russian regulatory reform (2016) sought to introduce the risk-orientated approach – a move away from the “blanket inspections” (or the risk regulation reflex – a term coined by Blanc in 2011) method that has been criticised by the Russian business community. The present paper aims to assess its success using administrative data on federal watchdogs’ inspections. We argue that this reform ultimately failed in its goal regarding the overall number of inspections, and thus the volume of regulatory burden did not change significantly throughout the reform. This failure resulted from two mechanisms. First, the legal framing of the reform radically redefined risk as the probability of incompliance (as opposed to the likelihood of accident). Second, the watchdogs used key performance indicators that incentivised “street-level” inspectors to maintain the pre-reform regulatory burden levels.

Type
Articles
Information
European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 174 - 190
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank Dmitriy Skougarevskiy for his help, insight and encouragement. The research was funded by the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 17-18-01618).

References

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