ABSTRACT
The earlier chapter on law and regulation discusses how the state and other public authorities use the instruments at their command to try to achieve behaviour and other changes they believe to be desirable. The conclusion is there are high costs of this kind of action: citizens and other actors often resist commands, no matter how reasonably conceived and well set out they may be. Top-down regulation often encourages strategic behaviour on the part of those who are regulated and the result need not necessarily promote the objectives of the law or rule, but instead advance private aims. But there is another, gentler way, which can communicate the reasons and motivations behind a desirable course of action that the state or other public actor wishes to promote. It does not have the consequences of having to do something, but instead aims to encourage people to carry out certain actions willingly and without compulsion. There may be kinds of activity that it is way beyond the reach of the state to compel people to do, either because it would be unenforceable or illegitimate to do so or just because it would be impossible to reach people or organisations. In fact, acts of persuasion might not be so different from other requests
coming from the state and other public actors. One way to look at law and regulation is to consider them as a certain kind of information that is presented to the citizens or organisations, which usually has the same qualities of reasoning and persuasion, but sanctioned by authority and with sanctions if not followed (though these may be hard to enforce). The argument this chapter considers is that the provision of information helps the tools, such as law and regulation, work effectively. So there is every reason for the state to present the same kinds of information without sanction, simply as a message that can be received by the citizens or associations as a piece of advice, if backed up by expertise, evidence and the implied authority of public authorities. If citizens freely discuss these messages – and own them – then so much the better. Thus information and persuasion are part of a family of soft tools that states and public authorities have always used, which have grown in use with the rise of professionalisation and expertise within the bureaucracy. State officials are keen to spread their advice more generally as they increasingly rely on expert forms of information collected by themselves and their agents.
