About Centre for Civil Society

Centre for Civil Society (CCS) is an independent public policy think tank based in New Delhi. Our work advances individual choice, institutional accountability, economic freedom and better governance through research, policy engagement and public outreach. Over the years, CCS has built a substantial body of work on legal and regulatory reform, including the repeal of obsolete laws, quality of legislation, decriminalisation, regulatory barriers to enterprise and livelihoods, and trust-based governance.

CCS is seeking a Research Associate – Regulatory Reform & Governance to help take this agenda forward through rigorous research, data-driven analysis and policy engagement.

About the Role

The Research Associate will serve as the day-to-day research anchor for CCS's work on Repeal of Laws, Decriminalisation for Development, Trust-Based Governance and regulatory quality. This is an interdisciplinary applied research role at the intersection of law, public policy, economics, data and technology.

We are looking for someone interested not merely in documenting what laws and regulations say, but in investigating why they exist, how they operate, what incentives and costs they create, and whether their objectives can be achieved through better regulatory design.

Some of the questions at the heart of the role are:

• Is a law or regulatory requirement still necessary?
• What problem or harm is a regulation intended to address?
• Does a particular violation need to be criminalised?
• Are penalties proportionate to the underlying violation or harm?
• What costs, incentives and unintended consequences does a regulation create?
• Could the same objective be achieved through a simpler or less restrictive regulatory instrument?
• What evidence should inform a decision to retain, amend, decriminalise or repeal a law?
• What legal and administrative changes would be required to implement reform?

Working under senior research leadership, the Associate will combine legal and regulatory research, structured data analysis, AI-enabled research methods and economic reasoning to answer these questions and translate the findings into actionable policy recommendations.

Key Areas of Work

1. Repeal of Laws

CCS has worked for over a decade on identifying obsolete, redundant and dysfunctional laws and building the case for their repeal. The Associate will help systematically assess this body of work and develop its next phase. The Associate will:

• Develop and operationalise an analytical framework and indicators for stocktaking CCS's Repeal of Laws initiative.
• Build and maintain a structured repository of laws previously identified for repeal and track their current legal status.
• Undertake legislative and regulatory history research across Central and State laws.
• Trace amendments, repeals and subsequent government and legislative action relating to CCS recommendations.
• Support an evidence-based assessment of the initiative's policy impact.
• Identify laws and categories of legislation requiring further review.
• Anchor research and drafting for the Repeal of Laws Stocktaking Report.
• Contribute to the Repeal of Laws Whitepaper and development of a next-generation repeal agenda.
• Undertake comparative research on statutory review and sunset mechanisms and contribute to a Sunset Clause Paper.
• Serve as the research anchor for CCS's annual Appeal for Repeal of Laws Day on 26 November, working closely with the Policy Impact and Outreach teams.

2. Decriminalisation for Development

The Associate will anchor research examining the use of criminal and punitive provisions within India's regulatory framework and identifying opportunities for proportionate reform. The Associate will:

• Support the development, refinement and application of the Decriminalisation for Development Toolkit.
• Develop systematic methods for identifying and classifying criminal and punitive provisions across Acts, Rules and associated regulatory instruments.
• Analyse the regulatory objective, underlying harm and nature of violation associated with identified provisions.
• Assess provisions against indicators including necessity, proportionality, intent, severity of harm, enforcement discretion and availability of alternative regulatory instruments.
• Examine the use of imprisonment, fines, licence cancellation, seizure and other punitive measures within regulatory frameworks.
• Undertake legislative, regulatory and case-law research on priority provisions.
• Review and update CCS's existing state-level decriminalisation research.
• Undertake new regulatory audits across four additional states.
• Build comparative datasets to identify patterns in criminalisation, penalties and enforcement frameworks across jurisdictions.
• Develop provision-level Reform Matrices setting out the existing regulatory position, identified problem, proposed alternative and route to reform.
• Support the preparation of legally sound and administratively feasible recommendations for government engagement.
• Anchor research and drafting of the Decriminalisation for Development Research Report/Whitepaper and associated policy outputs.

3. Trust-Based Governance

The Associate will contribute to CCS's research on moving towards more proportionate, predictable and trust-based approaches to governance. The Associate will:

• Undertake research and analysis for the Trust-Based Governance / Jan Vishwas Whitepaper.
• Track and analyse reforms replacing criminal sanctions with civil and administrative penalties.
• Examine the design and implementation of decriminalisation reforms.
• Assess whether replacement penalties and compliance mechanisms themselves satisfy principles of necessity and proportionality.
• Identify further opportunities for reform across relevant regulatory frameworks.
• Track significant developments in regulatory and decriminalisation policy at the Centre and across states.

4. Legal Design, Co-Creation and Regulatory Innovation

CCS's regulatory reform work seeks not only to identify problems in existing laws and regulations, but also to develop practical alternatives that are simpler, clearer and more responsive to the people and institutions affected by them. The Associate will support the use of legal design, co-creation and design-thinking approaches across CCS's regulatory reform portfolio. The Associate will:

• Apply human-centred and problem-solving approaches to the analysis and redesign of laws, regulations, compliance processes and regulatory institutions.
• Map the experiences and interactions of citizens, businesses, regulators and other stakeholders with regulatory processes to identify points of friction, ambiguity and unnecessary burden.
• Support the design and facilitation of co-creation labs, stakeholder workshops and structured consultations involving government, regulated entities, practitioners, researchers and civil society.
• Translate stakeholder experience into clearly defined regulatory problems while distinguishing implementation challenges from problems originating in regulatory design.
• Develop and compare alternative regulatory approaches rather than assuming that amendment, decriminalisation or repeal is necessarily the appropriate solution.
• Use tools such as problem mapping, stakeholder mapping, regulatory journey mapping, process mapping, scenario development and prototyping where appropriate.
• Support the development of model provisions, redesigned compliance processes, regulatory alternatives and implementation pathways.
• Test proposed reforms with affected stakeholders and incorporate evidence and feedback into subsequent iterations.
• Work with legal, economic and policy evidence to ensure that co-created solutions remain legally sound, administratively feasible and attentive to incentives and implementation constraints.
• Document co-creation processes and translate their findings into research outputs and government-facing reform proposals.

Prior experience with legal design, design thinking, participatory research, co-creation, systems thinking or innovation labs would be an advantage, but is not mandatory. Candidates should, however, demonstrate an openness to interdisciplinary and participatory approaches to policy research.

5. Building an Integrated Regulatory Reform Framework

Across these workstreams, the Associate will help connect CCS's work on: Repeal of Laws | Quality of Laws | Decriminalisation | Sunset Clauses | Trust-Based Governance | Regulatory Impact Assessment. The Associate will:

• Maintain the legal and regulatory evidence base underlying these initiatives.
• Develop and apply consistent indicators, coding protocols and analytical frameworks across projects.
• Undertake comparative research on regulatory-reform approaches in India and internationally.
• Identify emerging research questions and opportunities for regulatory reform.
• Support Regulatory Impact Assessments and other approaches for examining the costs, benefits and unintended consequences of regulation.
• Translate complex legal, regulatory and quantitative findings into concise, decision-ready policy recommendations.
• Work closely with CCS's Policy Impact and Outreach teams to translate research findings into government engagement, public-facing outputs and policy conversations.

Research Approach

This role requires a researcher comfortable moving between legal texts, regulatory data, economic reasoning and public policy. A typical research exercise might involve: Identifying a regulatory provision → tracing its legislative history → understanding its objective → examining relevant case law → coding its compliance and penalty structure → comparing it across jurisdictions → assessing costs and incentives → examining necessity and proportionality → identifying alternative regulatory instruments → developing an implementable reform recommendation.

The Associate should therefore be equally interested in close reading and systematic analysis: capable of understanding an individual legal provision while also identifying patterns across hundreds or thousands of provisions