From agriculture to sport and from climate change to indigenous rights, transnational regulatory regimes and actors are multiplying and interacting with poorly understood effects. This interdisciplinary book investigates whether, how and by whom transnational business governance interactions (TBGIs) can be harnessed to improve the quality of transnational regulation and advance the interests of marginalized actors.

This volume explores a variety of forms of transnational private governance where non-state actors cooperate across borders to establish rules and standards accepted as legitimate by other agents. Transnational private governance is a core feature of the devolution of power that we observe in the global realm and that is bringing about new forms of authority. Transnational Private Governance provides theoretically and empirically informed insights into the interactions between states and non-state actors including domains beyond intergovernmental organizations, conventional non-governmental organizations, and multinational enterprises, covering a wide range of arrangements, from highly formal devolutions of power to lax and informal platforms of interaction between private actors. Contributing to the latest generation of globalization studies, the authors consider the relationship between states and markets as closely integrated and seek to broaden the scope of enquiry by including new patterns and agents of change on a transnational basis. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students of political science, international political economy, economics, business studies, globalisation and law.

The book studies emergence and consolidation of voluntary sustainability standards (VSS); private standards defining sustainability-related product features. The book takes stock of their success and their potential in mediating between economic and non-economic concerns of global production. Despite their private and voluntary nature, VSS generate profound consequences for the producers seeking certification, for the consumers purchasing certified products, and for others affected by their standards. VSS are used by public authorities in the EU as a functional complement to public measures regulating global value chains. At this juncture of market proliferation and public use of private regimes, this book studies how public authority can control, coordinate and review VSS. It studies how the regulation of VSS could unfold through substantive and procedural legal requirements in the domain of European Union law and World Trade Organisation law, as well as through the incentives offered by VSS employment in public measures.

This book deals with a key feature of globalization: the rise of regulation beyond the state. It examines the emergence of transnational regulatory cooperation between public and private actors and pursues an inquiry that is at once legal, empirical and theoretical. It asks why a private actor and an international organization would regulate cooperatively and what this tells us about the material meaning of concepts such as 'expertise', 'authority' and 'legitimacy' in specific domains of global governance. Additionally, the book addresses the structures and patterns in which cooperation evolves and how this affects the broader global order. It does so through an investigation of two public-private cooperative agreements: one between the International Standards Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Global Compact and the International Labor Organization and one between the International Olympic Committee and the United Nations Environment Programme.

Bringing a timely synthesis to the field, The Handbook of Law and Society presents a comprehensive overview of key research findings, theoretical developments, and methodological controversies in the field of law and society. Provides illuminating insights into societal issues that pose ongoing real-world legal problems Offers accessible, succinct overviews with in-depth coverage of each topic, including its evolution, current state, and directions for future research Addresses a wide range of emergent topics in law and society and revisits perennial questions about law in a global world including the widening gap between codified laws and “law in action”, problems in the implementation of legal decisions, law’s constitutive role in shaping society, the importance of law in everyday life, ways legal institutions both embrace and resist change, the impact of new media and technologies on law, intersections of law and identity, law’s relationship to social consensus and conflict, and many more Features contributions from 38 international expert scholars working in diverse fields at the intersections of legal studies and social sciences Unique in its contributions to this rapidly expanding and important new multi-disciplinary field of study

This book examines how voluntary sustainability standards can be used to both regulate and coordinate producers in industries.