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Innovative regulation: Dynamic and responsive regimes
. The debates on labour 
market regulation are animated by concerns about a potential gap between labour law ―on 
the statute book‖ and its actual influence on real-world behaviour. These fears have been 
spurred by the disintegration of the standard model in advanced industrialized countries, 
and also by a renewed aspiration to protect workers in developing countries that is linked 
to their firmer integration into global value chains and to broader efforts to understand the 
operation of formal regulatory institutions in contexts of high unemployment, 
underemployment and informal employment (Conaghan et al., 2004; Davidov and 
Langille, 2006; Fenwick et al., 2007). The responses to these challenges are only beginning 
to be mapped (Fenwick et al., 2007; Lee and McCann, forthcoming), thus rendering the 
design of legal frameworks on domestic work, although vital, necessarily complex and 
uncertain. As a consequence, a degree of experimentation is inevitable in designing legal 
frameworks on domestic work, including on working hours (ILO, 2009). 
This complexity suggests that the regulatory outcomes for domestic workers should 
be dynamic and open to the processes of empirical testing and incremental reform. Some 
models show that statutory standards may be periodically evaluated and tailored reforms 
introduced (for initial reflections on this process, see Frey, forthcoming).
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Policy actors 
may wish to encourage the systematic study and investigation of processes of 
implementation of any laws governing domestic workers with the objective of determining 
regulatory good practice in a systematic manner. Such approaches would be in line with 
recent insights from the legal literature on the effectiveness of regulatory models in 
developing countries, which suggest experimentation coupled with empirical-evaluation as 
a response to regulatory uncertainties (Fenwick et al., 2007; Lee and McCann, 
forthcoming). This literature suggests a distinction between the content of the substantive 
standards and their implementation, with the processes of experimentation being centred 
primarily on the latter.