Research Statement

Institutional Development: Examining the origins of private environmental and social governance programs

In a wide range of economic sectors, non-state actors are acquiring governance roles and responsibilities conventionally held by governments. Examples abound. Private conservation organizations have helped implement and enforce park protection policies in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Transnational corporations now often use private arbitration, rather than national courts, as a venue for dispute resolution. As well, through their associations, these and other companies are offering codes of conduct as a means to govern an array of company and industry-wide activities. Further still, social and environmental organizations, partnering with businesses, have created private certification programs to regulate economic activities in sectors including coffee, tourism, mining, fisheries, and forestry.

These examples are meant to illustrate an extant shift from a state-centric to a multi-centric system of global governance and to show how governance arrangements writ large are currently in flux. Examining and understanding these emerging models – including where they come from and how they develop and change – is therefore important since their form and content are likely to influence the governance arrangements that persist into the future. To do this, a theory delineating how and why new governance arrangements emerge, why they come in varying forms, and what drives and constrains the changes they undergo once they are established is needed. Although a growing body of work is addressing these and related questions, in a number of ways (which I discuss below) my contribution will be unique.

Codes of conduct and private certification programs serve as the research focal point. For the remainder of this proposal, they are both considered private governance arrangements. They do, however, vary markedly. They vary in what they regulate, how they regulate, how they originate and when, and what they hope to accomplish. This research will examine two facets of the variation: (1) a binary “emerge” – “not-emerge” variation, and (2) a configurational variation measured by what the programs seek to regulate, who is regulated, and who has a stake in governance decision-making. These will permit examining three theoretical questions: (1) where governance innovation comes from, (2) whether, and if yes, how do early decisions made by private governance programs and the ideas these different actions embody form paths constraining future decisions and (3) through what processes are governance innovations generalized across issue areas.