RegNet Research Paper No. 2014/92

Gender, Class, Resilient Power: Nepal Lessons in Transformation

John Braithwaite, Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University (ANU)

Control of armies, police and parties delivers hard power in the ‘state of exception’ illustrated by civil war in Nepal. The history of Nepal nevertheless shows how in revolutionary conditions, the crowd can be decisive to advance equality. Soft people power is mostly superior for advancing egalitarian agendas than hard power. Yet momentary people power must grapple with ancient, entrenched, material power. While ethnic or religious groups sometimes create armies, political parties, states within a federation, women do not create such institutions of hard power. Deft vernacularisation of women’s rights, LGBT rights and the rights of Untouchables into the discourses of both Maoist and western hard power delivered some egalitarian shifts. This case reveals how windows of soft power that advance gender and class equality can be widened in the face of resurgence of the hard power of parties, militaries, crony capitalism and foreign capital. Together, window-widening, disciplined nonviolence and vernacularisation to enroll hard power can deliver transformations that favour the marginalised.

RegNet Research Paper No. 2014/93

Is the Intelligence Community Changing Appropriately to Meet the Challenges of the New Security Environment?

Grant Wardlaw, Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet), ANU

Pity the intelligence policymakers or officials attempting to design the ideal organisation to meet the changed strategic and operational environment that now faces them. The world has changed so much since the end of the Cold War that it is in many respects almost unrecognisable. Many see a clear divide between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ threat environments. Treverton (2009), for example, sees the ‘old’, characteristic of the Cold War era, as concentrated on large, slow-moving targets and a shared frame of reference between agencies that facilitated communication with policymakers and made it easy to slot in new information. By way of contrast, ‘new’ issues are the transnational threats, such as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and transnational organised crime, which are small and constantly changing targets with no permanent addresses. They are constantly and rapidly evolving, they exploit our societal vulnerabilities, and they are intelligence mysteries — questions whose answers are inherently unknowable in detail.

The implications of this change of targets are substantial. The threats are increasingly diffuse, transnational in nature and cannot be dealt with by single states. The information required to produce intelligence analyses comes from many different sources, which needs to be shared with a growing number of partners, many of whom are outside of government. It is likely, then, that the nature of intelligence systems and practice requires both fundamental change and a capacity for continuous adaptation if these are to keep pace with the changing environment. This chapter attempts to assess the extent to which the intelligence community has been up to this challenge. It outlines some of the debates about what change is necessary, describes some changes that have taken place and asks how significant (and fit for purpose) the changes that have occurred have been.

RegNet Research Paper No. 2014/94

Lessons from Pike River: Regulation, Safety and Neoliberalism

Neil Gunningham, Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet), ANU.

This article draws on the findings of the Pike River Royal Commission and other investigations, on the wider international literature on Work Health and Safety (WHS) regulation and on the writer’s own interviews with mining industry stakeholders, to develop a composite picture of what went wrong at Pike River and how best to prevent such disasters in the future. It argues that there are four pillars of effective WHS management and regulation: appropriately designed regulation; effective implementation and enforcement; a competent and motivated enterprise/facility operator; and genuine worker representation and participation. However, building or strengthening these pillars is difficult to achieve. Over and beyond legislation incorporating a complementary combination of different types of standards and worker empowerment, a skilled and adequately resourced regulator is essential. Where regulators are neither, then implementation is likely to be severely compromised. Moreover, unless the influence of neo-liberalism and its accompanying free market ideology are substantially negated, then these pillars are vulnerable to being undermined, creating the seeds of a future disaster. Implications of the Health and Safety Reform Bill are also considered.

RegNet Research Paper No. 2014/95

**[Overcoming Oppression in Child Protection: Restorative Justice, Responsive

Regulation and Political Courage](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2685453)** Valerie Braithwaite, Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet), ANU

Data from seven empirical studies undertaken as part of the Capacity Building in Child Protection Projects are used to demonstrate how Iris Marion Young’s (1992) five faces of oppression apply to child protection. Overcoming entrenched oppression within child protection systems requires authorities to offset their tight networks of control with open networks of dialogue and collaborative problem solving. Two promising institutions for doing so are restorative justice and responsive regulation (Braithwaite 2002). In order for these institutions to flourish, however, political leaders must put aside the politics of moral panic and punishment (Warner 2015).

All previous papers published in the RegNet Research Paper Series are available for download on the RegNet SSRN page.

Cite the publication as

RegNet Research Paper Series Vol. 3, No. 9, 2015. Regulatory Institutions Network.