The regulation approach is a distinctive contribution to evolutionary and institutional political economy that was developed to explain, above all, the origins, relative stability, and later crises of the Atlantic Fordist mode of growth based on mass production and mass consumption in relatively closed national economies. It identified a key role for the Keynesian welfare national state in regularising this mode of growth. The approach was reworked to take account of other modes of growth and, more recently, to include the deepening integration of the world market. One development has been increasing interest in governance (steering) compared to regulation (regularisation) in recognition of the supposedly increased and still increasing complexity of global political economy.

In this light, Prof. Bob Jessop - Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) and currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster - addressed five sets of questions in the 6th Käte Hamburger Lecture :

(1) how has the nature of the state and state power changed in response to changes indicated the new societal self-description of 'world society' and its cognates;

(2) have we moved from a world of regulation to a world of governance;

(3) if the Keynesian welfare national state emerged in response to market failures, neo-liberalism emerged in response to state failure, and the discourse and practices of governance emerged in response to the limits of a return to the market, does governance escape the challenges of governance failure;

(4) are the experiences of governance failure - and, indeed, of meta-governance failure - too explicable in terms of growing complexity;and

(5) what are some of the appropriate responses to metagovernance (including regulatory) failure in a world of complexity?