This video features Manfred Kohler’s presentation, delivered at the CALC Conference in Singapore in July 2026. Drawing on the Regulatory Institute’s experience of reviewing bills from jurisdictions around the world, the presentation examines regulation as a global activity and the opportunities for learning across jurisdictions.
About the presentation
The presentation draws a parallel with the automotive industry, where manufacturers work with a large pool of candidate components, sharing solutions and learning from one another. Engineers can “pick and choose” the components that best serve the purpose of a particular vehicle, rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
It asks whether a similar approach could make lawmaking more efficient and more complete. Regulatory knowledge remains largely national, while experience and solutions from other jurisdictions are rarely considered systematically. At the same time, the range of possible policy and regulatory elements is growing, while drafters and policy officers have limited time and capacity to consider all the possibilities.
The presentation explores how sharing regulatory knowledge across jurisdictions and making a wider range of candidate regulatory elements accessible could help drafters identify additional possibilities, adapt existing solutions to their own context, and construct more complete legislation in less time.
It concludes by considering whether a joint international knowledge base for policy and regulatory elements could help make lawmaking more efficient and contribute to better-quality legislation worldwide.