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In recent years, regulation scholars and policymakers have increasingly turned their attention to the role of inter-governmental organizational design in effective governance. The existing literature on regulatory design has provided important insights into the advantages and disadvantages of alternative structural options. This article synthesizes and builds on that literature by describing a novel framework for characterizing, analyzing, and structuring authority across public institutions. Drawing on examples from a range of jurisdictions, it highlights the value of this framework in identifying the values tradeoffs that should drive policymakers' decisions to choose among competing structural alternatives. The framework is founded on two important points. First, inter-governmental allocations of authority can be structured along three different dimensions. Failing to appreciate the existence of, and differences among, these dimensions can prompt misassessments of the reasons for existing regulatory failures and selection of structural allocations that do not suit the problems intended to be addressed. Second, allocations of authority can, and in many cases should, vary for disparate governmental functions. Differential functional allocations of authority can minimize obstacles to needed structural reforms and tailor inter-governmental relations in ways that best promote chosen regulatory values, such as efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability, as well as how allocational choices may and perhaps should vary depending on the governmental function being performed. Finally, the article suggests how future regulation and governance scholarship can harness this emerging framework to help build a body of empirical evidence upon which policymakers can draw in future regulatory design endeavors.

The creation of new administrative agencies and the realignment of existing governmental authority are commonplace and high-stakes events, as illustrated by the recent creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 and of new financial regulatory agencies after the global recession of 2009. Scholars and policymakers have not devoted sufficient attention to this subject, failing to clearly identify the different dimensions along which government authority may be structured or to consider the relationships among them. Analysis of these institutional design issues typically also gives short shrift to whether authority should be allocated differently based on agency function. These failures have contributed to reorganization efforts that have proven ill-suited to achieving policymakers' goals due to mismatches between the perceived defects of existing structures and the allocations of authority chosen to replace them. This Article introduces a framework for assessing how governmental authority may be structured along three dimensions: centralization, overlap, and coordination. Using examples from diverse policy areas including national security, financial markets, and environmental protection, it demonstrates how differentiating among these dimensions and among particular governmental functions better illuminates the advantages and disadvantages of available structural options. Though recognizing that the optimal allocation of authority is inexorably context-specific, the Article concludes with preliminary observations about how certain allocations of authority are likely to better promote certain important policy objectives than others.

The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social-ecological-technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, self-organized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance involves the private and public sectors as well as formal and informal institutions, self-organized to fill governance gaps in the traditional roles of states. While new governance forms are emerging, they are not yet doing so rapidly enough to match the pace of environmental change. Furthermore, they do not yet possess the legitimacy or capacity needed to address disparities between the winners and losers from change. These emergent forms of adaptive governance appear to be particularly effective in managing complexity. We explore governance and SETs as coevolving complex systems, focusing on legal systems to understand the potential pathways and obstacles to equitable adaptation. We explore how governments may facilitate the emergence of adaptive governance and promote legitimacy in both the process of governance despite the involvement of nonstate actors, and its adherence to democratic values of equity and justice. To manage the contextual nature of the results of change in complex systems, we propose the establishment of long-term study initiatives for the coproduction of knowledge, to accelerate learning and synergize interactions between science and governance and to foster public science and epistemic communities dedicated to navigating transitions to more just, sustainable, and resilient futures.