CADS10 Castellano. 2006 - Generalitat de Catalunya

Introduction
Regulatory instruments are among the most important tools available to
governments to fulfil their policies. To guarantee the quality of the regulation and
develop methods for assessing it has therefore been a traditional concern of
governments when it comes to improving the quality of government actions.
The introduction of sustainable development as a holistic political objective
creates new challenges for regulatory instruments. Sustainability must also
become an overall objective of regulation. Therefore, in addition to assessing regulation
of the usual standards, regulatory impact must be assessed from the point of
view of sustainability. Regulation must therefore be compatible with the principles
and objectives of sustainable development and, in order to evaluate this
compatibility, it is essential also to have a specific, systematic assessment tool.
The idea of regulatory impact assessment is far from new. Although not initially
related to sustainability, from the end of the 1970s in the context of strategies
for reforming regulation, regulatory impact assessments were carried out with
different objectives in a broad range of countries. The assessment tool used in
these cases was RIA (Regulatory impact Assessment), an instrument that aims
to provide a systematic analysis of the positive and negative impact of regulatory
proposals. The experience gained with RIA will therefore be valuable when it comes
to creating a tool aimed at assessing impact on sustainability.
This report –the result of a collaboration agreement between the Advisory
Council for Sustainable Development of Catalonia (CADS) and the International
Governability Institute (IGI), signed on 15 th June 2005 with completion date on
30 th November of the same year– is based on the interest the CADS has shown
in RIA and the international experience that exists in the field, and aims to
develop an initial proposal for applying this type of tool in Catalonia, in the form
of an assessment instrument that enables the inclusion of sustainability-related
points of view in the regulatory process. This document is therefore aimed
mainly at Catalan government players with the aim of promoting understanding
and use of assessment in Catalonia.
The first chapter of this project presents RIA as an assessment instrument, with
its objectives and main characteristics, in terms of both its substance (contents)
267