Abstract: Our paper shows how “institutional” is the production of regulation’s ruling by studying the production of a new ruling in a federal structure with two levels of regulatory decision –making and two levels of judicial review. We show that a new applied regulation is produced in a process of trials and corrections induced by the incompleteness of the basic law and the limited rationality of regulators and judicial reviewers at the local and at the federal level. In a multi-level regulatory structure, being typically federal, that process of regulatory production is very cyclical (with five steps of innovation, imitation and correction). That process is both diversified (different units creating independently and differently the applied regulatory frame) and sequential (all units not entering the regulatory production on the same point and at the same moment). We applied that new analytical frame to a case study being the new regulation for renewable energy in India (a typically federal country).

Download the paper