The Politics of Local Regulation in Tanzania: The Quest for Multilevel Regulatory Governance

Regulation is currently perceived as an art and craft of governance where the regulatory processes are an outcome of interdependences between political actors, bureaucrats, business community, and the public at large. However, it is now extensively recognized that this interdependency is beyond one level of government particularly in the era of decentralization where regulatory outcomes are a result of a complex set of interacting levels. This study concedes that regulatory processes are intrinsically political endeavor. Principally, local government regulatory processes are characterized by multiple actors at different levels of governance, i.e., the local government itself and stakeholders within its jurisdiction and the central government. In fact power dispersion has a vertical direction consisting of actors stemming from different governmental levels as a consequence of decentralization. The complexities of the relationships of multiple actors at different levels of government and across the same level of government create a number of risks that jeopardize quality local regulation that need to be managed calling for multilevel regulatory governance anchored on effective stakeholder engagement and coordination. Particularly, engagement with local government during the design of new regulations is largely poor resulting in a missed opportunity to have informed decisions that enhance quality local regulation. To augment multilevel governance, it is imperative to improve the interface between central and local government with local authorities recognized as “co-producers” of regulatory outcomes. Effective implementation of Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) that safeguards proper analysis of proposed and existing regulation is of paramount importance to ensure evidenced based regulations, analysis of cost implications for the local government, the capacity of LGAs in to implement as well as legitimacy of regulations. Therefore this study examines the political tradeoffs between the central and local government and among other stakeholders.