What connects regulatory governance to poverty?

This chapter attempts to establish how to analyse the connections between regulatory governance and poverty reduction, in the context of dominant economic assumptions about the relationships between competition, regulation, economic growth and poverty. A critical examination of these assumptions suggests the need to consider a more complex and nuanced set of relationships which give due weight to non-economic factors. A further requirement is to establish working definitions of ‘poverty reduction’ and of ‘regulatory governance’ that also incorporate non-economic characteristics. It is suggested that the prevalent ‘long chain’ approach to assessing the impact of economic reforms on poverty reduction is inadequate, and needs to yield to an approach, possibly through ‘evidence-based policy’, that is able to capture the inconsistencies and ambiguities of real development and its variable impacts upon the poor. A broad interpretation of regulatory governance means that the role of institutional and political factors in poverty reduction strategy and policies can be included, and given a positive dimension, rather than the negative view of them incorporated into contemporary economic development accounts.