ABSTRACT

This chapter considers how complexity might usefully be applied to the study of regulation and regulatory systems. It explores what a complex regulatory space would look like and uses banking as an example to demonstrate how it can highlight the relationships, dynamics and tensions that give shape to patterns of banking actor behaviours and their relationship to systemic phenomena. The chapter identifies three key discursive 'issues' that are of central importance for banking – 'risk', 'liquidity' and 'confidence' – and highlights how banking's main actors, institutions and their interrelationships engage with and are structured by them, mindful of how these actors typically rationalise their contexts as they consciously or unconsciously choose how to behave and interact with one another. It also explores the regulatory space concept of 'resources' from a complexity perspective as things that regulatory actors engage or pursue in meaningful ways.