Better Regulation in the Digital Age (BRIDGE)

Governments and regulators are navigating a challenging path between capturing the opportunities of rapidly evolving digital technologies and managing their associated risks. Regulatory governance plays an important role in striking this balance—steering digital technologies towards responsible development, use and outcomes, while providing support for sustainable growth and innovation. 

Digital technologies pose unprecedented challenges to regulatory governance. Their rapid development creates uncertainty over future impacts and challenges the responsiveness of regulatory regimes. Additionally, the transboundary nature of the products and services offered, and network effects on other industries and public services​, make it difficult to design targeted regulations, coordinate regulatory governance and enforcement activities and establish accountability and transparency over outcomes.

There is a need to understand how to adapt and apply regulatory tools and processes to digital activities, and to support governments in leveraging these technologies to achieve effective and proportionate regulatory responses. 

The BRIDGE initiative helps regulatory policy makers navigate the digital age through two lenses: 

First, the initiative supports governments and regulators in adapting their regulatory systems to the unprecedented challenges of regulating digital activities. For example, considering the use of risk-informed, technology neutral regulatory practices and informing regulatory adjustments fit for digital technologies.

Second, BRIDGE helps governments leverage the opportunities of using digital technologies to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of regulatory management tools, such as stakeholder engagement and regulatory impact assessments.