Making regulation flexible for the governance of disruptive innovation: A comparative study of AVs regulation in the United Kingdom and South Korea

ABSTRACT

Many governments find it challenging to set up a regulatory regime to govern rapidly developing Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) technologies empowered by Artificial Intelligence. This paper analyzes flexible regulation as a tool for assessing regulatory reforms that govern disruptive innovations such as AVs. After defining flexible regulation as regulation that gives regulated entities choices for how to comply with the regulatory objectives, this paper develops Regulatory Flexibility Indicators (RFI) for rule structure, enforcement structure, and regulatory feedback. We study AVs regulatory reforms that took place recently in the United Kingdom and South Korea, focusing on how such reforms have enhanced regulation flexibility. This paper finds that regulatory governance in the United Kingdom is more flexible than in South Korea, indicating aspects of further reforms for improving regulatory flexibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligence
• autonomous vehicles
• disruptive technology
• flexible regulation
• governance
• innovation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Sanford Berg, John Braithwaite, Cary Coglianese, Damonte Alessia, Assem Prakash, and Wolf-Georg Ringe for helpful suggestions at the early stage of this research. We also thank constructive comments from the four anonymous reviewers and editors of this journal. We are particularly grateful for the enormous support and encouragement we have received throughout writing this paper from the five guest editors of this Special Issue, Tim Büthe, Christian Djeffal, Nora von Ingersleben-Seip, Sabine Maasen, and Christoph Lütge. This article is based on the research, ‘Measuring Flexibility of Regulations for the 4th Industrial Revolution,’ conducted at the Korea Institute of Public Administration in 2019. Ha Hwang was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2018R1D1A1B07047033).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For a detailed explanation of survey methods, see Appendix 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seung-Hun Hong

Seung-Hun Hong is a Research Fellow in the Division of Regulatory Innovation Research at the Korea Institute of Public Administration, South Korea.

Jonghan Lee

Jonghan Lee is a Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Regulatory Innovation Research at the Korea Institute of Public Administration, South Korea.

Sanghoon Jang

Sanghoon Jang is a Doctoral student in the Urban and Environmental Engineering Department at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea

Ha Hwang

Ha Hwang is a Research Fellow in the Division of Safety and Disaster Research at the Korea Institute of Public Administration, South Korea.