This article systematically evaluates whether, how, and to what extent twelve prominent forestry and fisheries certification schemes address human rights in their standards. In line with the broader cross-fertilization of the fields of international human rights and environmental law and policy, our results demonstrate that human rights norms and considerations – primarily Indigenous, labour, and procedural rights – are increasingly reflected in the rulemaking of these schemes. At the same time, our analysis also demonstrates the mixed and underwhelming performance of certification standards in protecting human rights norms, including those relating to women, children, racialized and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, workers, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, and peasants and rural peoples. Through descriptive statistics, we also show that levels of human rights adherence vary significantly across schemes and that standards developed in the forestry sector tend to outperform those for fisheries. Our methodology and results add a new dimension to efforts to assess the stringency, equity, and legitimacy of private authority in the environmental field.

At the intersection of imperial rule and private power, Shanghai rose to international prominence in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It did so by taking advantage of the extraterritorial status and the dynamic, cosmopolitan population of the International Settlement. In evaluating the fate of the Shanghai Municipal Council, we seek to ascertain how private authority could have been constituted on a transnational basis within the framework of a treaty port. The rise of Shanghai was linked to some of the ambiguities of overlapping imperial rule and the possibilities it created for legal and governance experimentation. This is particularly clear in realms most associated with sovereign power, namely the International Settlement’s attempts to claim some taxation power and maintain law and order. That power, however, was interstitial at best and the product of fragile balances, as shown by the Council’s ultimate failure to secure a full international legal status for Shanghai. Nonetheless, the rise and fall of the International Settlement at Shanghai are worth reflecting upon, not only in relation to the history of China, imperialism and international law, but also as a way of thinking how the authority of large metropolitan centres might be constituted.

While the current practice of the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, and the United States leans towards imposing only targeted sanctions in most of the cases, private actors often complain about inability to process financial transactions, ship goods, or deliver services in countries where sanctions targets are located. The impact of sanctions often ends up being widespread and indiscriminate because sanctions are implemented by for-profit actors. This article investigates how for-profit actors relate to the imposition of sanctions, how they reflect them in their decisions, and how they interact with the public authorities. The findings of our research show that for-profit actors, with the possible exception of the largest multinationals, do not engage with public authorities before the imposition of sanctions. The behaviour of for-profit actors in the implementation phase is in line with the assumption of firms and business as profit-maximisers. Weighting the profits from business against the costs of (non-)compliance and make the decisions that in their view maximise their profit. Indeed, de-risking seems to be the most common approach by the companies due to the uncertainties produced by the multiple and overlapping sanctions regimes imposed by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States.

The Institute of International Finance (IIF) is a key actor in global finance, mixing private-interest representation and market governance roles. Analyzing the historical development of the IIF offers important insights into the interaction between state and business and the resulting patterns of public and private governance. Based on archive sources and a unique set of interviews with elite policymakers spanning three decades, I argue that market structures, interest groups, and public policymaking processes stand in a recursive relationship. Secondly, I argue that interest groups take on private governance roles with the aim to remain the focal point of public policymakers vis-à-vis competing interest groups. This has important implications for the study of interest groups and global financial governance. The analysis of interest groups should be extended to the way they shape markets through private governance mechanisms and how that recursively feeds back into interest group advocacy and public policymaking processes to fully grasp lobbying dynamics. The study of global governance should include analysis of interest group competition within the opportunities and constraints emanating from public policymaking processes so as to understand the emergence of private patterns of governance and their interaction with public governance mechanisms.

In this article we investigate the institutional mechanisms required for ‘liquid’ forms of authority in transnational governance to achieve normative political legitimacy. We understand authority in sociological terms as the institutionalized inducement of addressees to defer to institutional rules, directives, or knowledge claims. We take authority to be ‘liquid’ when it is characterized by significant institutional dynamism, fostered by its informality, multiplicity, and related structural properties. The article’s central normative claim is that the mechanisms prescribed to legitimize transnational governance institutions – such as accountability or experimentalist mechanisms – should vary with the liquid characteristics of their authority structures. We argue for this claim in two steps. We first outline our theoretical conception of political legitimacy – as a normative standard prescribing legitimizing mechanisms that support authorities’ collectively valuable governance functions – and we explain in theoretical terms why legitimizing mechanisms should vary with differing authority structures. We then present an illustrative case study of the interaction between liquid authority and legitimizing mechanisms of public accountability and pragmatic experimentalism in the context of transnational business regulation. We conclude by considering broader implications of our argument for both the design of legitimate transnational governance institutions, and future research agendas on transnational authority and legitimacy.

This article discusses the advantages of a pragmatist theory of global democracy for understanding the political relevance of new phenomena such as the emergence of forms of private authority and transnational movements in tackling with global issues. The article shows in particular that the pragmatist notion of ‘publics’ offers promising insights and proves particularly promising for completing the transition from methodological nationalism to methodological cosmopolitanism that is required to understand new normative practices developing at the global level and to inquire into their conditions of validity. After having presented a basic outline of the pragmatist theory of democracy, I discuss the contribution of pragmatism to the critique of methodological nationalism and proceed then to examine and reject two alternative approaches to global politics – transnational public sphere theory and global representation theory – showing why they fail to overcome methodological nationalism. The last two sections explore private entrepreneurial authority in contexts of global governance and shows that pragmatism succeeds in explaining their political role, while the other two approaches fail.

Those supplying private regulation in the global economy face two fundamental challenges if they are to ameliorate the problems for which they create these systems: targets must conform to, while demanders must have proof of, regulatory compliance. This paper explores an important area absent from assessments as to whether, when, and how, private regulatory bodies are successful in improving behavior and rewarding compliant firms: the role of technological innovations. Employing an inductive, comparative case study analysis, we offer an analytical framework that distinguishes technological innovations that improve tracking mechanisms from innovations that directly improve on-the-ground performance. We illustrate the utility of the analytical framework through an assessment of technological innovations in shaping “non-state market driven” global certification programs governing forestry, fisheries, coffee, e-waste, and climate.

The work on ‘regime complexes’ – loosely coupled regimes linked through non-hierarchical relationships – provides a lens for understanding the increasing density of international rules and institutions. However, the role of private authority in the regime complex – situations where non-state actors set rules or standards that other actors adopt – has only recently received academic attention. In this article, we ‘unbundle’ the concept of the regime complex in two novel ways. Firstly, we argue that an accurate depiction of any regime complex must also include private authority. Secondly, using examples from environmental governance, we carefully elaborate four specific mechanisms through which public and private authority interact, demonstrating the ways in which private authority can improve the problem-solving capacity of regime complexes. In short, a full understanding of the contributions of private authority to solving environmental problems requires examining its interactions with public rules and institutions.