Recap of 2025 @ RegNet

It’s hard to believe 2025 has been my sixth year at the helm of RegNet. We’ve released our annual report for this past year, which provides an overview of the wide range of work we do in the School. It is available to view online or to download. My Director’s note offers a preview of what it contains:

2025 marked another eventful year at RegNet, The Australian National University’s School of
Regulation and Global Governance. The challenging global context provided us with many important reminders of why we do the work we do.

Understanding the changing nature of regulation and governance is not only essential to appreciating how current societal dynamics have taken shape but also necessary for responding to the challenges that can emerge from them. This year’s annual report captures the many innovative ways our colleagues have approached these issues, demonstrating how the School harnesses interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to do so.

A core feature of RegNet’s collective work over the last year has been to support our community. We have welcomed a new PhD cohort and a growing number of postgraduate students across our masters and graduate certificate offerings. Two new research fellows, Nicholas Drake and William Kakenmaster, have also joined the School.

Professor John Braithwaite has onboarded our first group of Balzan PhD Fellowship on New
Horizons in Restorative Justice and Restorative Peacemaking recipients. This initiative, with Deputy Directors Zelalem Tesfaye Sirna and Yan Zhang on board, promises to deepen restorative research capability among young scholars in Africa, China and worldwide.

While we welcomed new colleagues, we unfortunately also said a final farewell to Emeritus Professor Roderic (Rod) Broadhurst. An internationally renowned cybercrime expert, Rod’s research was broad in scope, ranging from malware detection to organised crime and other forms of offending in China and Cambodia. His legacy continues through the work of the many PhD graduates and interns he mentored through the ANU Cybercrime Observatory.

As we remember colleagues and look to RegNet’s 25th anniversary, we have approached 2025 as a year of productive consolidation: we have strengthened our foundations and built new programs of work.

Our research funding successes are enabling us to establish those new programs of work. RegNet is part of two NHRMC Centres of Research Excellence (CRE), with Professor Sharon Friel, Associate Professor Ashley Schram and Dr Nick Frank involved in the newly awarded CRE on Shaping Markets for Health Equity led by University of Adelaide. Associate Professor Nick Bainton’s team is co-developing a First Nations research agenda on agreements between extractive companies and Indigenous peoples amid the growing demand for critical minerals, and Associate Professor Jarrett Blaustein’s new Adaptive Policing Lab is advancing knowledge and partnerships for more ethical and socially responsive approaches to public safety. We are also celebrating five new RegNet books, which you can read about in the pages that follow.

Our postgraduate education programming continues to grow under Associate Professor Jarrett Blaustein’s leadership as our Deputy Director for Education. We have streamlined our degrees in regulatory governance and technology governance, while also developing a distinctive new research training degree specialising in governance. We continue to partner with the National Regulators Community of Practice (NRCoP) to deliver The Professional Regulator: Foundation, which has quickly become the industry standard in regulatory capability development since its launch in 2023.

Our education and research reflect RegNet’s longstanding commitment to meaningful engagement with academic, civil society and government partners. Those activities have continued throughout 2025, with Professor Veronica Taylor being invited to present research to the OECD’s Regulatory Policy Committee, Professor Alan Gamlen and the ANU Migration Hub holding its third Migration Update and Professor Sharon Friel and her Laureate team hosting the third iteration of the Planetary Health Equity Future Leaders Program.

Overall, 2025 has been a valuable time for reflecting on and pursuing our shared goals as a School. We have been thankful for our committed professional team, which has enabled us to translate our ideas into action.

As we look forward to 2026, we invite you to look at our plans for the coming years. You can stay up to date in real time by joining our mailing list, following us on LinkedIn or visiting us in person.

Thank you for your ongoing interest in the work of RegNet. We wish you well in the year ahead.