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Article Excerpt
Graz, Jean-Christophe, and Andreas Nolke, eds., Transnational Private Governance and its Limits (London and New York: Routledge/ECPR Studies in European Political Science, 2008).
Fuchs, Doris. Business Power in Global Governance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007).
Pattberg, Philipp H. Private Institutions and Global Governance. The New Politics of Environmental Sustainability (Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007).
In research on globalization, global politics, and global governance, it is increasingly accepted that nonstate actors--business entities, civil society organizations, think tanks, and others--matter. It is also recognized that business actors, in particular transnational corporations and business associations, can have considerable influence. Furthermore, attention has been called to business's capacity to exert authority by itself, to private self-regulation of standard setting and codes of conduct, and to new public roles for the private sector exemplified by the widespread discourses on corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship.
This debate is not new. Several of these themes were recognized and analyzed almost four decades ago under the heading of "transnational relations." (1) Many have also been a permanent concern for international political economiy (IPE) scholars such as Susan Strange (2) and for neo-Gramscian and historical materialists. (3) But during the years when the debates between realism, neorealism, liberal institutionalism, and, later, constructivism had captured center stage in international relations scholarship, these issues were not seen as central to the field.
The books reviewed in this essay--along with several others (4)--testify to the fact that such themes are moving closer to center stage for research in international relations and global politics. This attention to nonstate actors in general and business in particular is not alone in what seems to be a general reorientation of the entire field. The attention to lower-level networks among states--the disaggregation of the state (5)--and to the relatively independent roles played by international organizations and the political and bureaucratic processes within them, (6) and, more generally, the growing interest in global governance, are also important elements in a general movement away from state-as-unitary-actor-centered ontologies of the international realm.
The concerns and foci of the books reviewed here are overlapping but not identical. They are all interested in business and global governance, but they focus on different aspects and engage with adjacent areas in different ways. Doris Fuchs--as clearly indicated by the title of her book--is interested in business influence on global governance arrangements in general, or more precisely in how to analyze business power in any policy area and in a variety of institutional forms. In contrast, Philipp Pattberg focuses on one particular institutional form, which he calls private business co-regulation, meaning situations where business along with other private actors establish governance arrangements that do not involve public actors. His main interest is to analyze and assess this particular institutional form, and not issues of power and influence. Pattberg tends to see this institutional form as significant and of growing importance, which brings his book into dialogue with the volume edited by Jean-Christophe Graz and Andreas Nolke. Their book shares the interest in private governance, but with more attention to the limits of private governance, and without focusing on cases where businesses engage with other nonstate actors in "co-regulation." Being an edited volume, it covers a broad range of policy areas at the inevitable cost of depth in the analysis. This differs from Pattberg's book, where he studies two cases in greater depth, both of them from the environmental area: the Forest Stewardship Council and the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies. Both of these books focus on private governance, but they are also interested in broader questions of global governance, and therefore also speak to some of the issues discussed by Fuchs. Common denominators for all three are the interest in business and global governance, and the interest in efforts to get a theoretical handle on this topic. This review will pay particular attention to the theoretical contributions offered by the three books.
These agendas--to develop concepts and ways to analyze business power, to analyze and assess new institutional forms involving business and global governance, and to analyze political processes with a view to explaining their outcomes--are all relevant and important indeed for the study of world politics and global governance tasks. For these reasons, the books are welcome additions to the literature. They all have something to offer, raising relevant problems, posing interesting questions, suggesting answers, and in different ways and to varying degrees contributing to knowledge and understanding of global governance. But they are not without weaknesses, and the concepts, arguments, and conclusions suggested are not all equally convincing.
Philipp Pattberg's book, Private Institutions and Global Governance. The New Politics of Environmental Sustainability, has a clearly delineated focus: two cases of private business co-regulation. There is no uncertainty about the meaning of this notion; it is defined as "a distinct arrangement of private governance that institutionalises the behaviour of profit and nonprofit actors around a set of consciously devised and relatively specific rules" (p. 197). Pattberg's project is to explain why this new institutional form has risen and to assess its effects. To achieve this, he develops an analytical framework, addressing several conceptual and methodological issues along the way, and then applies it to the two cases. But he also has a wider ambition: he wants to contribute to the more general debate about global governance, offering a "reconstruction of the contested concept of global governance" (p. 27), and he wants to support the claim that private business co-regulation is a central, indeed decisive, feature of global governance, and one that is of growing importance.
The two case studies are interesting, informative, and useful for readers with an interest in these two arrangements: the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies. Pattberg shows convincingly that the FSC is a case of a highly institutionalized private governance arrangement that brings together business and nonbusiness actors, in a formalized setting that makes rules in the form of standards for sustainable forestry practices, contributing to their implementation through certification schemes.
The explanation for the emergence of the FSC starts out from the four categories of conditions identified in the theoretical introduction: (1) "macro-systemic transformations," as well as "contextual factors at the macro-level" (a rather broad and open set of explanatory variables); (2) the "problem structure," which seems to point to the configuration of interests and distribution of capabilities among actors; (3) "the organizational resources that enable actors to reduce transaction costs or improve their strategic position"; and (4) "ideas and models that allow actors to agree on a common framework" (p. 62).
When applying these categories to the FSC case, Pattberg groups categories 1 and 2 as the "demand side" and 2 and 3 as the "supply side" of regulation (p. 105), whereas previously he grouped 2 and 3 as "micro-level conditions" and 1 and 4 as "macro-level conditions" (p. 62). In practice, however, Pattberg...
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