Admission requirements
This course is open to Erasmus Exchange Students (Public Administration), Students of the Minor Bestuurskunde: Openbaar Bestuur, Beleid en Management, and Leiden University students (elective/keuzevak).
Description
Regulatory governance challenges have been at the centre of the current public and political debates, touching upon such cross-national issues as the global financial and migration crises, threats posed by climate change, regular food-related incidents and scandals, serious cross-border health threats (e.g., COVID-19). Given the cross-national nature of regulatory risks, transnational infrastructures – international-level regulators – have increasingly become involved in various regulatory governance aspects – for example, policy development, standard setting, rulemaking, and enforcement.
This course focuses on introducing students to the varieties, vulnerabilities, and virtues of international regulatory governance. To better understand international-level regulation, we will pay close attention to the following questions: who are the regulators at the international level? What is being regulated? How is international regulation carried out? More specifically, the course will focus on the questions of how international regulation is designed, what role professionals and regulatory bodies play in shaping it and how states cope with it, how EU and other international regimes generate rules across various policy areas at European and global levels. The course will address the most current issues concerning the politics of regulation: risk regulation across various regulatory domains, artificial intelligence-based regulation and its challenges, etc.
Course objectives
1) To understand the major actors, processes, and issues of international regulatory governance;
2) To critically evaluate theories and approaches to international regulatory governance and understand how they apply to real-world case studies;
3) To apply concepts, theories, and methods used in the study of international regulatory governance for the analysis of international regulatory governance actors, processes, and issues.
Timetable
On the right side of programme front page of the E-guide you will find links to the timetables, uSis and Brightspace.
Mode of instruction
Lectures and class discussions.
The class meets primarily as a lecture in which the core theories/concepts/case studies are presented by the lecturer to reveal their insights and limitations. This is a reading-intensive course whose success depends critically on students’ preparation and active participation (e.g. by asking questions). We will cover a great deal of material in this course, and the readings will vary, requiring participants to absorb and gain mastery over a range of theoretical perspectives and information about a variety of International Regulatory Governance issues and empirical cases. This will require a collective “piecing together” of theoretical arguments and empirical evidence.
The total course load is 140 hours:
Lectures (partly in seminar format, including presentations): 7× 2 hours.
Self-study: 126 hours (including reading / research for paper proposal and final paper)
Assessment method
The final grade is the weighted average of:
Individual research paper proposal: 25%
Individual research paper: 75%
From 2020-2021 onwards, partial grades will not remain valid after the exam and the resit of the course.
You can find more information about assessments and the timetable of exams on the website. Details for submitting papers (deadlines) will be posted on Brightspace.
Students that want to take part in a resit for a written exam, are required to register via uSis. Use the activity number that can be found on the ‘timetable exams’.
Reading list
Will be announced in the course outline.
Registration
Registration in uSis is possible from four weeks before the start of the course, after registration for the entire minor.
Leiden University uses Brightspace as its online learning management system. Important information about the course is posted here. After enrolment for the course in uSis you are also enrolled in the Brightspace environment of this course.