Responsive Regulation and the Regulatory Framework of the Road Concessions Sector in Brazil: an ex ante analysis of the ANTT’s Road Concessions Regulation (RCR).
Road Concessions Regulations. ANTT. Responsive Regulation. Regulatory Pyramid. Road Infrastructure.
In recent years, the National Land Transportation Agency (ANTT) has faced a significant regulatory problem, characterized by two aspects: the mitigated use of responsive mechanisms in the federal road concessions sector; and the misalignment between the agency's regulations and the concession contracts. As a solution, a comprehensive regulatory effort was proposed for the entire sector, which would result in the publication of the Road Concessions Regulation. In a few words, the RCR will introduce generic rules, allowing for greater simplification and standardization of regulation, and will represent a true “entry way” for the formalization and widespread use of the Theory of Responsive Regulation in the federal road concessions sector. With this in mind, this paper aims to understand the contours of the regulation intended by the ANTT, how the lens of the Regulation will unveil the new regulatory framework by providing new answers, tools and assumptions for the agency's actions and how the solutions proposed by the RCR can be organized and laid out in a diagram aimed at building an efficient, low-cost and uniform regulatory ecosystem in the sector. In this mission, the Command and Control model and the minutiae of Responsive Regulation Theory will be unraveled, as well as the transition trend towards the aforementioned theory in Brazil. After that, the historical evolution of the four stages of the Federal Highway Concessions Program, which took place between 1994 and 2022, will then be explored in order to identify the points of convergence and divergence between them. With these results in hand, an in-depth analysis will be made regarding the Responsive Action Project implemented at the agency and, in parallel, the detailed characteristics of each of the five RCR standards. At the end, this work will make an innovative contribution by drawing up a diagram of the solutions proposed by the Regulation using ANTT's own regulatory pyramids, based on the guidelines of Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite's Responsive Regulation Theory.