Power and the Practice of Transnational Private Regulation

ABSTRACT

Corporations, NGOs, and private regulatory initiatives have taken on functions once assumed to be the domain of the state and inter-governmental organisations. While researchers are racing to assess the impacts of private rules, theoretical statements remain focused on the design, legitimation, and intermediation of private initiatives or the hegemony of neoliberal governance. This paper instead highlights the grounded practices of transnational private regulation, and it argues that much about these practices can be explained through a straightforward (but multi-faceted) analysis of power. Specifically, unpacking the practice of private regulation requires a focus on (1) the distinctive power struggles that animate different types of standard-setting projects (which should not be reduced to a single logic), (2) the saturation of private regulation with corporate power (not merely the capture of particular intermediaries), and (3) the construction of compliance in ways that accommodate state powers at the point of implementation. These points are illustrated with examples from research on private rules for land and labour and accounts of standards wars more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational governance
• global standards
• contestation
• corporate social responsibility
• multi–stakeholder initiatives
• regulatory intermediaries
• global production networks
• theory

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments on previous versions of this paper, I thank Jean-Christophe Graz, Janina Grabs, Thomas Dietz, Nicole Helmerich, and other participants in the Lausanne workshop on Grounding the Politics of Private Governance. The paper also benefitted from feedback at the Research Seminar in Political Science at the University of St. Gallen, including comments from Klaus Dingwerth, Oliver Westerwinter, and James Davis.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Advisory Board Listing as of June 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160610005251/http://www.sa-intl.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&pageId=494

2 The amount of certified land has hovered around 200 million hectares since mid-2017.

3 This was upgraded to ‘free, prior, and informed consent’ with version 5.0 of the standard in 2015.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Bartley

Tim Bartley is a Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His most recent book, Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines the implementation of fair labor and sustainable forestry standards in Indonesia and China. The book received the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award from the Environmental Studies section of the International Studies Association and an honorable mention from the Global and Transnational Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. He has published articles on Social Movements, Regulation, and Global Governance in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Socio–Economic Review, Global Networks, and a number of other journals.