The New Anticipatory Governance Culture for Innovation: Regulatory Foresight, Regulatory Experimentation and Regulatory Learning

Abstract With the rapid pace of technological innovation, traditional methods of policy formation and legislating are becoming conspicuously anachronistic. The need for regulatory choices to be made to counter the deadening effect of regulatory lag is more important to developing markets and fostering growth than achieving one-off regulatory perfection. This article advances scholarship on innovation policy and the regulation of technological innovation in the European Union. It does so by considering what building an agile yet robust anticipatory governance regulatory culture involves. It systematically excavates a variety of tools and elements that are being put to use in inventive ways and argues that these need to be more cohesively and systemically integrated into jurisdictions’ regulatory toolbox. Approaches covered include strategic foresight, the critical embrace of iterative policy development and regulatory learning in the face of uncertainty, and the embrace of bottom-up approaches to co-creation of policy such as policy labs and the testing and regulatory learning through pilot regulation and experimentation. The growing use of regulatory sandboxes as an EU policy tool to boost innovation and navigate regulatory complexity, as seen in the EU AI Act, is also probed.