Devolution of Authority in a Centralized Space: The Jamaican Regulatory Environment

The reform of the centralized Jamaican regulatory landscape in the 1990s was promoted via the adoption of the independent regulatory model. The key driving force behind this model is that its decentralist configuration will negate undue political interference in regulatory affairs. So, the devolution of authority framework was encouraged as one of the institutional designs to facilitate separateness between politics and regulation. The central premise of this research-in-progress paper is that Jamaica’s pervasive centralized governance framework will pose institutional challenges to the decentralist arrangement advanced by the devolution of authority model. Using new institutional economics theory (NIE) and a qualitative research design, this paper explores the extent to which the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) accords with the demands of the politics-regulation dichotomy demanded by the devolution of authority model. This paper is driven by my constructivist philosophical orientation and desire to apply a “Black Box” approach.