Research on the regulatory policy making has increased significantly over the years particularly since the UN conference on the environment in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972. However, limited attention has been given to the role of higher education in regulatory policy making. The reasons for its limited application in the developing nations is not quite clear. Whether because it lacks the glamour of great constitutional/regulatory issues or appears forbiddingly complex or simply has been overlooked by scholars of the regulatory process, the study of the impact of higher education on the regulatory process remains largely unexplored. This study is directed towards filling that gap in the literature on regulatory policy making.
Using the concept of structural functionalism developed several years ago by anthropologists Malinowski. Radcliff-Brown and Emile Durkheim, the dynamics of the regulatory institutions were elucidated in the study. The principle of functionalism assumes that "form is always determined by function." Institutions represent the social arrangements of life in human societies. They provide the procedures by which societies organise and regulate their social and cultural activities to meet the necessities of individual and collective existence and to persist through time.
Higher education in this study can provide various educational programs to extend the benefits of higher education facilities and know how to the regulatory institutions. It can pursue the "diffusion" service which once done can have radiating and long term impacts on the regulatory institutions. Transfusion, infusion and diffusion are the various methods of service that higher education can render to the regulatory institutions and the community through its Professors or students, departments, colleges or by the administrators of the Institutions. Higher educational Institutions in this study serves in its "being" as well as in its doing.
