Performance-based regulation establishes mandatory goals rather than enforcing prescriptive standards. Performance-based regulation has become popular over the past two decades as an alternative to prescriptive regulation, as it holds out the promise of simultaneously achieving health, safety, and environmental outcomes while facilitating innovation and reducing regulatory costs.

In the early 1990s New Zealand adopted a performance-based building control regime. This regime demonstrably failed, resulting in then ‘leaky building’ crisis. In Enhancing Performance-Based Regulation: Lessons from New Zealand’s building control system Peter Mumford examines whether the failure can be attributed to the performance philosophy and features of the regime.

The author explores two strategies for resolving the challenges of decision making in a permissive performance-based regulatory environment: improving the predicative capability of decision-making systems through the better application of intuitive judgement associated with expertise and wisdom, and treating novel technologies as explicit experiments.