Navigating Murky Waters: characterising capture in environmental regulatory systems

Regulatory capture is the quest by vested interests to exercise excessive influence on one or more aspects of a regulatory system. While conceptually simple, it is difficult to define and thus hard to diagnose and mitigate. In the environmental arena, sound regulation is at risk from, among other things, amorphous and contested conceptualisations of the ‘public interest’, politically salient asymmetries and scant institutional recognition of the breadth and depth of capture impacts. This article examines some indicative scenarios to illustrate potential impacts of capture and characterise motivations, conditions and outcomes that enable capture. We propose a wide-boundary definition which frames capture as a risk present throughout a regulatory system and delineates several potential types of capture and their characteristics.