Regulatory Capture and the Role of Academics in Public Policymaking: Lessons from Canada's Environmental Regulatory Review Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes an academic law reform model capable of generating viable climate and sustainability policy proposals capable of attracting broad popular appeal. The article unfolds as follows. Following a broad and conceptual Introduction, Part II further unpacks the concept of regulatory capture and the processes by which capture is accomplished, using the Canadian petroleum industry’s capture of environmental law and policy to illustrate how capture works in practice and to ground the novel academic law reform model that is the central contribution of this article. Part III further establishes the need for a novel academic approach to countering capture by briefly examining what this article calls the “catch-22” of regulatory capture reform, and again draws on recent evidence from Canadian environmental law reform efforts as illustration. Part IV, the core of the article, examines Canada’s recent environmental regulatory review process, which concerned the reform of the critically-important federal environmental assessment regime and culminated in Bill C-69 and the new Impact Assessment Act, to advocate for a novel and iterative model of academic law reform capable of countering regulatory capture and generating effective and politically-durable climate and sustainability policies in the public interest. Part V concludes by discussing the limitations of the model proposed here and areas in need of further research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".