What is Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA)?
Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) is a leading element of the better regulation and the most comprehensive and successful governance tool accepted on the international platform aiming at systematically examining the possible benefits and costs as well as the positive and negative impacts of an existing or to be drafted legislation.

Public institutions and agencies shall enforce legislations affecting millions of people and economically resulting in great sums. The deficiency, insufficiency or inefficiency of the rules, in other words its insufficiency for problem solving, is understood during the implementation and amendments are made. In order to break this vicious circle and increase the quality of the legislation, Regulatory Impact Analysis, a policy determination tool consisting of specific steps, was developed and started to be utilized widely in OECD and EU countries as of 1990s.

RIA is not a document to be written after the preparation of the draft texts but a road map required to be followed during the preparation process of legislation. For this respect, it is a dynamic decision making tool, which can also be implemented for the existing regulations.
 

RIA shows whether a legal norm (intervention) is required for solving a problem and if so, the options likely to be utilized for solving that problem. It evaluates the options in terms of social, economical and environmental impacts and accordingly guides the decision makers. By this way, both the damages which cannot be remedied later are prevented and the public officials are guided towards measuring and evaluating the possible impacts of legislation via option creation and various analytical tools.

As a natural result of the negotiative and participative democracy understanding, the social sections (stakeholders) to be affected by these policies should be involved in this public policy making process. RIA may meet this need via its interactive, active and systematic consultation process.

In an open, transparent, accountable, participative public management understanding, the public officials are required to be in a continuous contact with the people and the civil society in their field of duty and open to all kinds of social demands and solution proposals. Adoption of this attitude and behavioral pattern is a time consuming process. At this point via RIA, the fact that the stakeholders will have an active role in the process starting with the problem definition until the preparation of the legal text will both end up with a sound regulation and increase the efficiency of the implementation.