The question of how digital health is regulated has become increasingly important within debates on technology, inequality and global health. While digital health is frequently celebrated for its capacity to expand access, build resilient systems and advance equity, scholars have raised critical concerns about its role in reproducing asymmetries of power. The potential for reproducing rather than curbing inequality is particularly relevant for the Global South. This Special Issue of the International Journal of Law in Context interrogates the ways in which digital health infrastructures, regulatory frameworks and transnational data flows are constitutive of coloniality and neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together socio-legal, feminist and decolonial perspectives, the contributions examine regulation as a terrain in which vulnerabilities, exclusions and structural inequalities are reinforced. Against the celebratory rhetoric of innovation, this collection situates regulation as a key site for understanding the entanglement of digital health with broader histories of coloniality and capitalism.

This article presents a study of how institutional constraints affect legislative activism and how legislative activism in turn affects policy change through an analysis of the European Union's legislative process. The argument revolves around the key role of the European Commission in advancing policy change, and emphasises that the Commission can successfully push for increased policy change by increasing its legislative activity when the institutional opportunity space widens. Using a novel panel dataset covering eight policy sectors from the period 1984–2012, the article shows that the number of legislative proposals significantly affects the extent of regulatory reform in the EU. The rise in the number of legislative proposals, in turn, is affected by the extent of gridlock between the EU's legislative bodies. These findings show that the Commission steps up its legislative activity when the institutional opportunity space allows for greater policy change.

Networks famously epitomize the shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ as governing structures for exercising control and coordination besides hierarchies and markets. Their distinctive features are their horizontality, the interdependence among member actors and an interactive decision‐making style. Networks are expected to increase the problem‐solving capacity of political systems in a context of growing social complexity, where political authority is increasingly fragmented across territorial and functional levels. However, very little attention has been given so far to another crucial implication of network governance – that is, the effects of networks on their members. To explore this important question, this article examines the effects of membership in European regulatory networks on two crucial attributes of member agencies, which are in charge of regulating finance, energy, telecommunications and competition: organisational growth and their regulatory powers. Panel analysis applied to data on 118 agencies during a ten‐year period and semi‐structured interviews provide mixed support regarding the expectation of organisational growth while strongly confirming the positive effect of networks on the increase of the regulatory powers attributed to member agencies.

Since 2003, the European Commission has produced analytical documents (called Impact Assessments, IAs) to appraise its policy proposals. This appraisal process is the cornerstone of the regulatory reform policy of the European Union. Previous research has been concerned with the quality of the IAs in terms of evidence-based policy, usages of economic analysis and other standards of smart regulation. Instead, we move to a different perspective. We draw on the narrative policy framework to explore IAs as a text and discursive instrument. Conceptually, insights from discursive institutionalism are used to explore narratives as tools of coordination within complex organizations such as the European Commission, and as communicative tools through which policy-makers seek to enhance the plausibility, acceptability and, ultimately, legitimacy for their policy proposals. Empirically, we consider a sample of IAs that differ by originating DGs, legal instrument, and level of saliency. The findings show that both in coordinating and communicating policy, the European bureaucracy projects a certain definition of its identity via the narratives it deploys. The Commission may use IAs to produce evidence-based policy, but it also an active narrator. It engages with IAs to provide a presentation of self, to establish EU norms and values, and to create consensus around policy proposals by using causal plots, doomsday scenarios, and narrative dramatization.

Over the last three decades, European Union regulation of the internal market has become highly pervasive, affecting practically all domains of European citizens' lives. Many studies have focused on understanding the process and causes of regulatory change, but with limited attempts to analyse the more general sources of regulatory reform. This article focuses on the determinants of stability and change in EU regulation. An original dataset of 169 pieces of legislation (regulations, directives and decisions) across eight different sectors is developed and the dynamics of regulatory reform in the EU are analysed. Using time‐series analysis of count data, evidence is found that the number of winning coalitions in the Council and the size of EU membership have a significant impact on regulatory reform in the EU. By contrast, the ideological composition of the EU's legislative bodies is not systematically related to regulatory reform.

This paper considers dangers and pitfalls associated with a range of oversight options and scenarios, including self-regulation, government regulation, donor monitoring and community participation. The paper outlines the blind spots and sources of potential bias associated with each of these oversight mechanisms. Examining the Ugandan case study we find that perceptions of corruption and ineffectiveness tarnished the reputation of the sector, but at this stage the proposed peer review mechanism and stricter government regulation are unlikely to improve NGO sector outcomes. Government regulation is anticipated to be ineffectual due to poor design and insufficient resource allocation, but both of these factors may be attributable to the underlying political motivations. Similarly, not much is expected from the peer review mechanism because participation is voluntary, offers few benefits and the list of guidelines is too long and contains too many vague and intangible quality standards. The paper argues for more empirical research to inform the design of oversight mechanisms and to monitor the impact of self-regulation and government regulation on the NGO sector. This may also help to expose and limit opportunistic interventions by government, often thinly concealed under the conceptual cloak of accountability and oversight.

One of the most innovative measures of the political financing regulatory reforms of the past 2 decades was the creation or designation of new political financing supervisory bodies, entrusted to monitor and enforce political financing regulations. These bodies have been growing in numbers in the last 2 decades, partly in response to public opinion pressure and partly to international commitments. Drawing on regulatory and organisational capacity theories, this article seeks to develop a new index to measure the enforcement capacity of these bodies.

Modern Elections can be conceived as a socio-technical system, as the electoral process in many ways relies on technological solutions: voter information, identification and registration, collecting, verifying and counting the votes – in some countries these steps are conducted by using innovative technologies. But how do those devices and processes actually become part of the official legislation and can finally deployed during this sensitive and important democratic procedure? Over time, the State of California has developed a robust regulatory ecosystem for integrating innovative technology into the electoral process and is also able to change and modernize its rules and regulations. Although technologies currently used are more static, hardware-based and usually do not include algorithmic systems, the overall structure of the process may also function as a blueprint for regulating more dynamic algorithm-based or even AI-based technologies.

Commodity grades seem like innocuous measures of quality and thereby escape scrutiny as to their origin, purpose, and effect. Drawing on the National Live Stock and Meat Board’s executive meeting minutes and US Food Administration (USFA) records, this essay contextualizes and politicizes government beef grading. The USFA played a key role in the lead-up to government beef grading and in the creation of the Meat Board. USFA messaging as well as a post war depression curtailed consumption of feedlot-derived beef. In response, industry leaders formed a trade association called the Meat Board that acted as a liaison between industry and public sector scientists and helped bring about government beef grading. Beef grading emerged in the broader context of a campaign launched by the USFA to modernize meat retailers. At the same time, breeders, feeders, and western ranchers pushed for government beef grading in response to low prices and as a panacea. The Meat Board also cooperated with agricultural scientists in coordinating research to boost feedlot-derived beef. Rather than industry cooptation of science, this essay shows an alignment of vision in a mutually beneficial relationship. These actors, furthermore, used government beef grading to protect the feedlot system of production.

Este trabajo vincula la evolución del poder de mercado de la banca española con la liberalización financiera entre 1970 y 1990. Se realiza una cronología de las medidas de desregulación y se mide empíricamente el poder de mercado, para lo que se ha elaborado un indicador directo, el índice Lerner. Se comprueba que la desregulación bancaria no fue lineal, y las entidades bancarias compitieron incluso antes de la liberación completa. Se aprecia que el poder de mercado disminuyó en los años 70, por la mayor competencia a través de la red de oficinas, seguido por un aumento en los 80, coincidiendo con un parón en las medidas liberalizadoras. Desde 1988, la competencia se intensificó de nuevo con la consolidación de las medidas liberalizadoras. Además, los resultados permiten descartar la tesis de las reformas financieras consideradas como un pacto entre la banca y las autoridades que no alteró el marco competitivo permitiendo a los grandes bancos cartelizar el sector.

The purpose of this study was to examine the legislative and criminological aspects of combatting fraud at the international and national levels. For an effective study of the topic, it was vital to use terminological, hermeneutical, comparative and historical methods. The study covered the essence of fraud as a criminal offence, and identified and analysed the most widespread types of fraud. The study identified the key elements of the crime of fraud: deception, intent of the offender, transfer of property as a result of misrepresentation, mercenary motive and establishment of factual damage. The study found that the key feature that classifies fraud as a criminal offence is the existence of an intentional act. As a result of the study, the international regulatory framework was analysed, as well as the legislation of Kazakhstan and Singapore on combatting fraud. Furthermore, the criminal law and criminological aspects of combatting the crime of fraud were studied through the practices of Kazakhstan and Singapore. The study paid special attention to the need to ensure an effective and complete legal framework in the field of fraud prevention and the development of strong international cooperation on this matter. The study also emphasized the significance of raising public awareness of the fraud situation and conducting educational activities to inform the public about the potential risks.