The governance authority of non-state actors in the business and human rights regime

Abstract

The symposium “Governance Authority in Business and Human Rights” explores the authority of non-state actors in the global business and human rights (BHR) regime. Our point of departure is that the involvement of different public and private actors in the BHR regime rests on their authority as governance actors. This alludes most obviously to companies, but also includes other actors. In this framing paper, we investigate these actors’ governance authority in three steps, which provides insights into the different ways in which their power in the BHR regime is (or is not) legitimated. First, we outline how the multiplication of actors in the BHR regime raises questions and challenges regarding its governance. In the second step, we introduce a concept of governance authority that captures distinctive forms of power and legitimacy, and how they connect to human rights. Third, we discuss how the concept of governance authority can be used to study particular non-state actors in the BHR regime, and how the contributions to this symposium do so. In sum, we discuss avenues for research that disentangle the different types of governance power and legitimacy of multiple actors in the BHR regime to clarify their public and private roles as well as their relevance in BHR governance.

Introduction

The symposium “Governance Authority in Business and Human Rights”¹ explores the authority of non-state actors as governance actors in the global business and human rights (BHR) regime. It highlights how actors other than states have become involved in human rights governance. Most visible is the influence of corporate actors: Their activities and products may help protect human rights, but can also significantly harm them. For instance, companies can play a key role in the provision of public goods such as education or health, but their activities can also cause or contribute to human rights violations, such as unsafe working conditions, the forced displacement of communities, and environmental pollution. A number of further non-state actors play an important role in the development, interpretation, and implementation of norms and rules in the BHR regime. These include, e.g., non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international financial institutions, independent national human rights institutions, certification bodies, ranking organizations, and independent experts. They all have in common that their effects on and their involvement in the BHR regime has transformed their power and legitimacy as global governance actors. In the framing paper, we focus on this multiplication of governance authority to investigate the shifting roles of non-state actors as governance actors in the BHR regime.

The point of departure for our analysis is that the involvement of different types of actors in the BHR regime rests on, and simultaneously contributes to, their governance authority. A closer investigation of this governance authority provides key insights into how the power of different types of actors in the BHR regime is legitimated. We define governance authority as the power to participate in the regulation of oneself and others and in the development, interpretation, and application of norms and rules related to the BHR field—a power that strives to be legitimated by virtue of its contribution to human rights. This understanding draws on a triadic concept of governance authority (developed in Mende, 2022) that links three key elements: power, legitimacy, and a connection to what counts as “public interests.” As we explain below, while the scope and content of what is considered a public interest is a matter of deliberation and power, established normative, political, and legal norms in global governance do acknowledge human rights as public interests. In the frame of the BHR regime, the claim or hope that an actor will contribute to human rights therefore serves as the point of reference for legitimizing non-state actors’ involvement in governance activities, i.e., their governance power. This alludes to both the demand for companies to assume responsibility for human rights violations and the rationale to include them in the development of BHR regulation: Their power to affect human rights engenders their power to regulate human rights issues.

Against this background, this symposium investigates the roles of actors other than states and international organizations that make up the BHR regime, including ranking organizations in their distinctive standard-setting role influencing corporate behaviors and understandings of human rights issues by developing indicators and rankings (Bexell, 2022), corporations in their use of private remedy mechanisms (Jos, 2022), and independent experts advising corporations on their human rights practices (McVey, 2022). As an analytical framework, this framing paper provides a concept of the governance authority of non-state actors in the BHR field that distinguishes between different forms of power, legitimacy, and a connection to public interests. This allows us to investigate the various manifestations of governance authority that result from the participation of non-state actors in the (formerly state-centered) human rights regime, as well as the close link between public and private governance roles.

In what follows, we first outline how the multiplication of actors in the BHR regime raises questions and challenges regarding the regime’s governance. Second, we introduce the triadic concept of governance authority to investigate these actors’ distinctive forms of power and legitimacy, and how they connect to human rights as public interests. Third, we depict how the concept of governance authority can be used to study particular actors in the BHR regime and how the contributions to this symposium use it. In the conclusion, we sketch out possible avenues for future research that disentangle the different types of governance power and legitimacy of multiple non-state actors in the BHR regime in order to clarify their roles and relevance in BHR governance.

The pluralization of governance actors in the BHR regime

Since the 1990s, when civil society critiques of corporate involvement in human rights violations gained momentum (Vogel, 2005), the state-centrism of the international human rights regime has increasingly come under pressure (Clapham, 2006). There are good reasons for such state-centrism. For example, it is founded in the system of international law, in which only states can ratify (and be bound by) international treaties obligating them to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights, mainly by implementing international obligations at the national level. However, the rise of globalization, privatization, and global governance has challenged this logic by extending regulatory procedures, fora, and actors beyond the level of the nation state (Barnett & Sikkink, 2008). While global governance did not substitute for or abolish government by states, it introduced mechanisms and spaces to address problems that states could no longer handle alone.

Companies remain among the most visible and important actors apart from states in the governance of global problems and global solutions. Their economic power and pursuit of private interests, maintained largely via lobbying, has been bolstered by the ability to participate in the formulation, interpretation, and implementation of political and legal norms, rules, standards, and regulations (Peters et al., 2009). Companies have also been increasingly able to maneuver into the gaps of global governance, facilitated by the development of global markets as well as states’ inability or unwillingness to regulate business conduct (Wettstein, 2009). These developments have undermined the idea that states are the only actors responsible for the respect, protection, and fulfillment of human rights.² Global-level debates, particularly regarding business actors’ roles and responsibilities related to human rights, gave rise to a wealth of standards, principles, and guidelines attempting to clarify and regulate corporate human rights responsibilities. This BHR regime draws on, critiques, and extends debates on CSR by emphasizing the governance roles of business and adding obligation and accountability to the idea of voluntary commitments, with a focus on human rights. At the same time, the question of how to address regulatory and governance gaps related to corporate human rights responsibility remains controversial (Ramasastry, 2015).

Underlying this controversy is the gap between the human rights regime’s focus on states as public actors of international law, on the one hand, and the relevance of companies as private actors, on the other hand. The controversy relates not only to companies’ economic power, but also their rising political, social, and normative power (Fuchs, 2013; Wettstein, 2009), as well as their involvement in matters of public interest. These forms of business conduct and power reveal that companies are not simply appropriating and exerting power; they are entrusted with it, which endows this power with some form of legitimacy. One way in which business actors obtain legitimate power is through processes of deregulation or in contexts where the state is absent; companies then use (and fill) governance gaps. Power may also be delegated to them, for example during privatization or when companies are invited to create public–private partnerships, which are often accompanied by societal recognition that values the expertise, knowledge, and/or resources that companies contribute to the public interest. Furthermore, business power may develop beyond the initial scope of deregulation or delegation.

The concept of private authority captures these transformations of business power (seminally Cutler et al., 1999; Hall & Biersteker, 2002). It denotes private actors’ legitimate power to participate in global governance and highlights how they regulate matters of public interest alongside the public authority of state actors. It therefore serves as a good starting point to analyze multiple governance actors and their authorities in global governance, since states are but “one source of authority among many, operating in a vast and diversified ‘market of authorities’” (Shamir, 2011, p. 332). To assess private actors’ governance roles in the BHR regime, and the connections between them, we first overview the plurality of actors involved and highlight interactions between states and non-state actors, as well as among non-state actors. This is because the “market of authorities” in the BHR regime involves a plethora of non-state actors fulfilling a wide variety of roles.

NGOs and civil society organizations were central to the inception of the BHR regime in the 1990s and have remained intimately involved since that time (Yaziji & Doh, 2009). The creation and adoption of standards to regulate corporate conduct with respect to human rights has been a central focus for advocacy organizations. Current efforts in the UN Human Rights Council to draft a binding instrument on BHR also depend heavily on the efforts of global civil society networks, particularly the Treaty Alliance network of NGOs (Deva, 2021). This coalition of leading international NGOs, environmental movements, trade unions, and victims’ organizations from around the world was pivotal to pressuring the Human Rights Council to start the process of drafting and negotiating a BHR treaty (Bernaz & Pietropaoli, 2017).

In addition to this advocacy role, various types of non-state actors are also involved in the production and dissemination of specialist BHR knowledge. This includes NGOs as well as independent national human rights institutions, research-focused institutions such as think tanks, organizations with a commercial orientation such as specialized (sections of) consulting firms, audit firms, law firms and independent experts. They also interact horizontally, e.g. when audit firms seek to promote NGOs as partners of corporations in governance, rather than independent watchdogs (Brès & Gond, 2014, Fransen & LeBaron, 2019). The governance authority of these knowledge brokers in the BHR regime has been noted in related fields, particularly with regard to auditing, but remains under-examined (Partiti, 2021; McVey, 2022).

Non-state actors also develop tools that allow businesses to present themselves as ethical or responsible and enable other businesses, as well as consumers, to identify them as such. For example, reporting frameworks, certification schemes, and performance benchmarks increasingly include human rights. Prominent BHR examples are the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (Bexell in this symposium) and sector-specific indices such as the Responsible Mining Index (Maher, 2020). Corporate human rights reporting in particular has burgeoned in recent years; it has made its way into legal reporting obligations. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), for instance, allows companies to self-report on their economic, environmental, and social performance using a large set of indicators, including on human rights. The widespread use of the GRI has given the initiative great legitimacy as “the de facto international reporting standard” (MacLean & Rebernak, 2007, p. 1). However, critical scholarship on the GRI shows how the organization’s emphasis has gradually shifted from promoting responsible business conduct to encouraging companies to use the GRI in their reporting. The more companies use the GRI, the greater its legitimacy as the leading standard for sustainability and human rights reporting (Sarfaty, 2015). This suggests that the increase in the number of actors and initiatives involved in the BHR regime does not necessarily bolster corporate human rights performance, as we may expect from such an expansion; it may also have unforeseen or unintended consequences, such as encouraging competition among actors with similar roles, turning the pursuit of legitimacy (being perceived as “more legitimate” than competitors) into an end in itself, as seems to have been the case for the GRI.

This symposium explores the various roles played by non-state actors in the BHR regime in further detail. Many of the roles outlined above are not confined to single actors, rather several actors play multiple governance roles at the same time, including public and private roles. For this reason, this framing paper introduces a triadic concept of governance authority—which encompasses the range of governance actors and takes their distinctive roles and meanings into account—to assess the power and legitimacy of non-state actors in the BHR regime.

The triadic concept of governance authority

We define governance authority as the power to become involved in regulating oneself and others, which is legitimated by an assumed contribution to public interests (drawing on Mende, 2022). This definition sheds light on three elements of authority: power, legitimacy, and a connection to public interests. In this section we briefly review the rich literature that draws on these elements to conceptualize governance authority. We then explore the meaning of the connection to public interests and how these three elements interact to constitute very different forms of governance authority in the BHR regime.

Despite a number of factions and frictions, studies in international politics generally agree that power is a pivotal element of authority. Our triadic governance concept does not predefine power, but may entail different manifestations, including the power to influence the output dimension of governance regulation, the input dimension of agenda setting, and the ideational power to shape underlying ideas and norms (Lukes, 2005). The latter type in particular extends power concepts which assert that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (Dahl, 1957, pp. 202–203), thereby including constructivist as well as realist notions of power.

Yet even in its various manifestations, power does not simply equal authority. Rather, governance authority includes a certain (varying) level of legitimacy, i.e. the acknowledgement by a relevant audience that an actor has the right to regulate. In a minimal definition, such an acknowledgement may simply come in the form of a lack of contestation (Wettstein, 2009). Other bases of legitimacy include epistemic values, technical expertise, moral reputation, and an output that caters to a global public interest (Buchanan & Keohane, 2006; Steffek, 2015). While scholars disagree on the degree of legitimacy³ (i.e. the degree to which an authority may find its legitimacy contested before it ceases), the triadic concept permits different degrees of legitimacy. Authority can thus withstand a diminishing degree of legitimacy, yet the complete loss of legitimacy would undermine an actor’s authority in the long run, render its competence ineffective or turn its power into force.

Given the general normative assumption that a governance actor should contribute to the public interest, the various legitimating mechanisms of governance power all relate to an implicit or explicit idea of public interests. This assumption can be traced back to the purpose of global governance, which is to deal with global challenges and solve global problems. Some concepts of global governance make their normative underpinnings explicit, such as by aiming to facilitate “good governance,” to provide “public goods” (Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance, 2015, p. 8) or “global common goods” (Zürn, 2018, p. 249) that are “backed by shared goals” (Rosenau, 1992, p. 4). Other concepts refer to less normative aims, but their underlying rationale, with its reference to efficiency or technical solutions, again relates back to public interests (Mende 2022). This is because global governance constitutes non-state actors’ extension of state regulation—which is by definition supposed to serve the public interest (Best & Gheciu, 2014). For this reason, governance authority means much more than the power to regulate oneself and others. It is inevitably tied to public interests—ideally speaking.

It is important to highlight three points when conceptualizing the connection to public interests as the third element of authority. First, the “connection to public interests” element links the public and private roles of non-state actors. Most visibly, it covers discursive claims intended to enhance an actor’s legitimacy to participate in governance. However, it is also possible that a governance action is detrimental to public interests. In any case, having a connection to public interests is not synonymous with actually contributing to public interests. The point is that a connection to public interests (understood broadly) drags regulation out of a purely private sphere. A private company regulating other private companies via private codes of conduct designed to respect human rights is not a purely private matter, because it involves human rights as a matter of public interest. This very closely links public and private roles in governance authority. Yet it does not simply bring private companies as private actors into question. It does, however, highlight how private companies become involved with public roles in global governance (while also pursuing private roles).

Our second point further explains the assumption that, as an element of governance authority, a connection to public interests may even be detrimental. Unlike the claim to contribute to public interests—which aims to legitimize governance power (though it may fail)—a detrimental effect on public interests does not directly strengthen the legitimacy of governance power. When civil society actors started addressing companies’ effects on human rights in the 1990s, they focused on the companies’ human rights violations—not contributions. However, directly addressing companies’ responsibility for violations led to legitimizing their involvement in regulating such responsibilities, i.e., assuming governance authority. Admittedly this process was facilitated by the rise of global governance and privatization, as well as the (controversial) preference for soft law instead of hard law regulation. Still, companies’ involvement in BHR regulation was backed by the hope that addressing their detrimental effects on human rights would lead to their contribution to human rights, thereby integrating them into BHR governance and endowing their governance power with legitimacy.

Third, the notion of public interests must be understood as a construct that can relate to quite different ideas and purposes. Due to the nature of the concept, it cannot be predefined. Ideally, it is a matter of democratic deliberation; non-ideally, power relations determine what is considered a public interest. Here, we use human rights as a reference point for public interests because definitions of public interests, while dynamic, rest on a number of norms, values, and agreements. The human rights frame represents such a global framework. Even though human rights are not fulfilled and remain a matter of critical inquiry, they serve as a global point of reference in moral, political, social, and legal terms (Mende, 2021a; Sikkink, 2017). Yet, as a normative reference point (like public interests), human rights provide room for competing interpretations that can be used for different purposes (and may be susceptible to power relations).

In effect, the triadic concept of governance authority traces the connections among the three elements. Generally speaking, the power to regulate requires legitimacy at some point. To achieve such legitimacy, actors strive to demonstrate that—in addition to their private interests—they pursue public interests. How this affects legitimacy depends on its perception by the relevant audiences (and sometimes the ideational power to shape those).

Such claims to contribute to public interests may also have the power to define public interests. This demonstrates another important feature of the triadic concept (Mende, 2022). The connections among the three elements do not simply apply in a unilateral or causal way, such that strong power leads to strong legitimacy, or vice versa. Rather, the links can work in multiple ways. Furthermore, each element may vary in the scope of its competencies, content, and the degree of institutionalization. This variety constitutes different forms of governance authority, some of which may be strong in all three elements; others may feature weak power and strong legitimacy, or vice versa. Likewise, some may appear at the heart of governance institutions, and others at the margins.

An example is the lobbying activities of companies and other organized interest groups that try to influence political decision-making, legislative processes, and the interpretation of laws and rules (Durkee, 2021) from outside the respective public decision-making institution (Hassel, 2010, p. 158). Lobbying from such an outside position is usually informal and non-institutionalized. It can be considered a rather weak form of governance authority (Mende, 2021b, p. 178) because the elements of legitimacy and the connection to public interests are comparably low, as lobbying is regarded as the pursuit of private interests. At the same time, however, the power to affect governance output via lobbying may be high. What is more, lobbying activities in some institutions, most visibly in the European Union, are becoming increasingly regulated and institutionalized, which legitimizes lobbying “as central to bringing citizens’ views and demands to the attention of legislators” (Binderkrantz, 2014, p. 526).

However, non-state actors’ governance authority may be considered strong when they regulate issues with no, very limited, or only the symbolic participation of state actors, which have extensive influence on other actors, including states (Mende, 2021b, pp. 180–181). For example, a small number of companies may create corporate codes of conduct that are applied across an entire sector. In this way, the codes of conduct come to guide the behavior of companies that were not involved in their development or interpretation, but abide by them because it may be pragmatic and cost reducing to do so, or because it is necessary in order to attract customers and enhance or maintain their reputation. Porter (2005) highlights various ways in which such private self-regulation affects global governance, including the global scale of business activities and their effects on customers. Most importantly, in terms of governance authority, private self-regulation may directly affect state actors’ behavior. Private codes of conduct may, for example, shape ensuing legislation (Porter, 2005) or guide the interpretation of existing laws (Durkee, 2021). In this case, all three elements of authority—power, legitimacy, and the connection to public interests—are strong. Still, legitimacy may rest on a very different basis, including the mere absence of state-authored regulations.

In sum, the triadic concept of authority brings to light new and different forms of governance authority that various actors in the BHR regime may hold. The concept is encompassing, as it includes different manifestations of authority as well as a wide variety of non-state actors; at the same time, it facilitates an analysis of their distinctive forms of power, legitimacy, and connections to public interests.

Researching the governance authority of non-state actors in the BHR regime

The triadic concept of authority provides a useful lens for studying the governance roles of the wide range of actors that shape the BHR regime. In the BHR regime, actors’ desired contribution to advancing human rights constitutes their connection to public interests, which legitimizes their authority to participate in the regime’s governance. This differentiates between multiple sources of power and legitimacy—and helps explain what they are based on. For instance, most NGOs have limited economic power, but they may be able to shape norms and ideas in the BHR regime (Davies, 2014, p. 8). Their perceived legitimacy as acting in the public interest compensates for their lack of economic power and provides them with ideational power. This underlines how governance authority in the BHR regime is not based on power alone; crucially, it relies on actors’ (perceived) legitimacy as drivers of human rights.

The triadic concept of authority also addresses a division between public vs. private concepts of governance authority. The governance literature categorizes public and private authority based on the type of public actors (state actors) or private actors (an umbrella term for governance actors that are not states or state-like actors). However, in the BHR regime (and in global governance more generally), actors often engage in both public and private functions. This represents a fundamental challenge to the distinction between public and private actors. In this context, the triadic concept does not predefine governance authority as public or private; nor does it simply record a blurring of public and private actors. Rather, analyzing the links among power, legitimacy, and the connection to public interests makes it possible to account for the concurrence of public and private governance roles, as well as hybrid roles and those that cannot be captured by the public–private distinction (Mende, 2022).

The symposium contributors focus on different non-state actors in the BHR regime and highlight the elements of their respective governance authority. Bexell (2022) focuses on the governance authority of ranking organizations and reveals how the way in which benchmark criteria and indices are constructed may obscure, rather than expose, human rights performance. While not intentionally, the technicality of rankings and benchmarks may distract from the political process of advancing human rights in business. Bexell (2022) argues that such organizations’ governance authority is grounded in their legitimacy as actors with an explicit human rights agenda, but that this legitimacy is challenged when rights holders are not central to the process.

Jos (2022) shows how large mining companies use their power in an exploitative way when they require people who have been negatively affected by their activities to waive their right to pursue a judicial remedy in exchange for monetary compensation. He questions whether (and how) this use of power is legitimated, considering that such legal waivers ultimately do not serve the public interests these companies claim to uphold in facilitating a remedial process for rights holders, but on the company’s terms.

McVey (2022) provides insights into independent experts’ governance authority as well as the role of the emerging “expert industry” in the interpretation and operationalization of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and large corporations’ internal human rights due diligence processes. She shows how these experts derive legitimacy from the UNGPs, which encourage corporations to engage with experts to develop policies and processes around human rights due diligence and the remediation of human rights harm. This provides them with a particular kind of authority in the BHR regime, which is legitimated by the status of “expert.”

Conclusion

This symposium aims to set the stage for the further study of the shifting governance roles of non-state actors in the BHR regime. It proposes an agenda for future research geared toward disentangling the various dimensions of governance authority within the regime in order to advance our understanding of how different types of non-state actors participate in (and influence) the setting, interpretation, and contestation of norms and rules. This research can pursue a number of follow-on questions. For instance, how do different types of non-state actors exercise power in BHR governance, and how is this power legitimated? How is legitimacy obtained and sustained, who grants it, and who are the winners and losers in these processes? What are the intended and unintended consequences of particular non-state actors’ involvement in BHR governance? To what extent does it make these governance processes more democratic, or does it lead to domination (or even cooptation) by powerful interests?

The triadic concept of governance authority provides an analytical tool to address these questions. It helps disentangle the various ways in which actors obtain and exercise power in BHR governance, how they (seek to) legitimate this power through a (claimed or desired) contribution to human rights, and how this legitimacy may be withheld or challenged. The contributions to this symposium provide a starting point for this analysis. They show how, on the one hand, including different non-state actors in BHR governance seeks to advance human rights by filling the regulatory deficits of state-based governance approaches. On the other hand, involving business actors in BHR governance also grants them more legitimate power and runs the risk that this power will be exploited. Furthermore, the contributions to this symposium illustrate how the power relations among different state and non-state actors involved in BHR governance can be skewed in favor of commercial interests, but also that relatively powerless actors nevertheless have the capacity to challenge the governance authority of ostensibly powerful actors by contesting their legitimacy to govern human rights issues. In this way, assessing governance authority highlights the influence of powerful non-state actors in BHR governance as well as that of the less powerful actors on whose recognition the governance authority of more powerful actors relies.

Future research can extend this analysis to other types of non-state actors. An examination of the governance authority of civil society in the BHR regime could pay closer attention to the roles played by large funders and philanthropic organizations, advocacy NGOs, and grassroots movements from different parts of the world. Another set of key actors in BHR governance that merits further study includes international financial institutions, such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and its power and legitimacy as a global norm setter through the IFC Performance Standards, which occupy an important space in the BHR regime. Finally, future research can highlight the role of specialized knowledge and expertise with respect to BHR. This could include considering the role of specialized BHR consulting, audit, and law firms (also see McVey in this symposium), as well as noncommercial actors that produce and convey BHR knowledge, such as research institutes and national human rights institutions.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The paper is based on research that is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project number 398306144, and by the Max Planck Society.

Notes on contributors

Janne Mende

Janne Mende is Senior Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, where she investigates the governance authority of public and private actors in the United Nations and the European Union. Additionally, she heads research projects dedicated to business and human rights. She has held a position as deputy professor for Transnational Governance at the Technical University of Darmstadt and visiting positions at the WZB—Berlin Social Science Center Research Unit Global Governance, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights, among others. Her research interests include global norms, global governance, human rights, and international institutions.

Anneloes Hoff

Anneloes Hoff is a legal anthropologist with over six years of research experience in business and human rights. As a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, she worked on the project “Business Actors beyond Public and Private: Authority, Legitimacy and Responsibility in the United Nations Human Rights Regime,” focusing on the evolution and contestation of corporate human rights due diligence. She holds a DPhil and an MPhil in Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Oxford.

Notes

1 This symposium results from the conference “Human Rights Responsibilities beyond the State: Pushing the Boundaries of Public and Private,” hosted by Janne Mende and Anneloes Hoff on June 10–11, 2021 at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. The conference was part of the research project “Business Actors beyond Public and Private: Authority, Legitimacy and Responsibility in the United Nations Human Rights Regime” (funded by the German Research Foundation DFG, project number 398306144) and associated with the Max Planck research group “The Multiplication of Authorities in Global Governance Institutions (MAGGI),” both headed by Janne Mende. A second focus of the conference was on the public-private distinction in the issue area of business and human rights, and this focus is published in the special issue on “Corporate Responsibility for Human Rights beyond the Public-Private Divide” in the Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 40(3), 2022.

2 There are numerous reasons for the continuing gaps in the respect, protection, and fulfillment of human rights, but we focus here on those related to business conduct.

3 For example, von Bogdandy et al. (2017, p. 140) and Zürn (2018) underline the contestation and possible rebuttal of governance authorities’ legitimacy, whereas Hurd (1999, p. 400) and Hall and Biersteker (2002, p. 4) equate legitimate power with authority. Kustermans and Horemans (2022, pp. 207–208) locate the difference between these two strands in the formality of authority.