Event Details
We were delighted to host Asst Prof Neha Mishra, Assistant Professor at the International Law Department of the Geneva Graduate Institute and External Research Fellow at SMU CDL, for a seminar on Regulatory Interoperability in the Digital Economy, chaired by Assoc Prof Han-Wei Liu, CDL Deputy Director.
Regulatory interoperability has emerged as a key concept in global digital policymaking, often framed as a pragmatic response to growing regulatory fragmentation and misalignment across jurisdictions. During the seminar, Asst Prof Mishra examined how this concept operates in practice—particularly as governments seek to balance the liberalisation of digital flows with increasing demands for digital sovereignty.
Drawing on the concept’s origins in military coordination and its evolution into contemporary regulatory practice, she explored how regulatory interoperability differs from traditional approaches such as harmonisation and mutual recognition, and how it may be operationalised in the digital economy. Using cross-border data flows as an illustrative case, she showed how emerging interoperability frameworks are developing through both formal international agreements and informal, transnational arrangements—yet often remain limited in scope, uneven in application, and shaped by geopolitical and power asymmetries.
A key insight from the seminar was that while regulatory interoperability holds significant promise for enhancing efficiency, legal certainty, innovation and more balanced global digital governance, it must be pursued with careful institutional design and procedural safeguards. Asst Prof Mishra emphasised that softer, more flexible forms of international cooperation may currently offer a more feasible and inclusive pathway than rigid, binding legal instruments in a deeply divided global digital order.
We thank Asst Prof Mishra for her thought-provoking and analytically rich insights on how regulatory interoperability could help shape more resilient and equitable frameworks for transnational digital and data governance.
