Regulatory reform is often seen as a road paved by good intentions, but leading to ‘policy hell’. The example of the railways seems to represent a prime example of regulatory failure, not only in Britain but also in Germany. This article analyses the notion of ‘regulatory failure’ in the railway domain by taking an analytical and a comparative perspective. First, it introduces a variety of explanations as to why regulation can go wrong. Second, it considers the design and the consequent evolution of the regulatory regimes for the railways in Britain and Germany since the early 1990s. Both countries offer similar life-cycles of regulatory reform, however differing in design, perceived failures and advocated solutions. Finally, it discusses how the literature on regulatory failure contributes to the understanding of British and German railway regulation and argues that any regulatory regime is not only characterised by a conflict of interests, but also by conflicts of standards of appropriateness that lead to inherent tension and potential causes for failure.

This paper approaches the study of national adaptation to the European Union as a process involving institutional constraints and actors' interactions across levels of decision-making. The argument is that domestic adaptation to the EU is a matter of the ability and willingness to conduct integrative political bargaining rather than a matter of matching institutional structures. The paper provides an empirical case study of the Norwegian adaptation to EU energy sector legislation, the Internal Energy Market (IEM). The various outcomes of different directives in this sector indicate that the structural feature of a particular state or policy sector is inadequate to explain fully variations in national and domestic adaptation to EU legislation. The paper focuses on characteristics of the process of adaptation itself, such as affectedness, policy similarities, bargaining opportunities, and legal proceedings.

This paper examines the labour standard-setting capacities of the EU and NAFTA. The social dimension to the EU is depicted as being organised along the principles of deliberative supranationalism. The North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation (NAALC), sometimes referred to as the Labour Side Accord, which is the labour standard-setting arrangement for NAFTA, is regarded as a tri-national institutional arrangement which grafts formal international procedures onto domestic labour market regimes. The paper seeks to describe and explain how the different types of activities in which the two social dimensions are engaged can be traced back to their overall institutional design. The paper argues that EU social policy is the stronger of the two arrangements and that NAALC has significant shortcomings. Yet it also argues that NAALC holds out interesting lessons for other regional trading blocs and other global experiments in labour market standard setting as its decentralised and `horizontal' character is more in keeping with the broad institutional design of these arrangements.