In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill of 2010, regulatory capture has become at once a diagnosis and a source of discomfort. The word capture has been used by dozens upon dozens of authors – ranging from pundits and bloggers to journalists and leading scholars – as the telltale characterization of the regulatory failures that permitted these crises. In addition, critics who doubt whether regulatory reforms will be sufficient draw on capture as a source of widespread skepticism (if not despair). Seen this way, capture of regulation appears not only as a significant cause of these crises, but also as a constraint on any realistic solutions. Most of those solutions will, in this view, be watered down or dashed by captured regulators in the future.

Is capture truly as powerful and unpreventable as the informed consensus seems to suggest? When it prevails, does capture pose insurmountable obstacles to regulation, so much so that we ought to give up on regulation altogether? This edited volume brings together seventeen scholars from across disciplines whose contributions together question this logic and suggest that capture may, in fact, be preventable and manageable.