A dynamic perspective on how public actors shape transnational private regulatory regimes

Abstract

This paper addresses recent calls to research interactions concerning private and public forms of governance in the transnational sphere. To date, the involvement of government has either not been considered, been promoted as a solution to the regulation proliferation problem or been conceptualized in the singular – one government interacting with numerous non-state actors. We extend these perspectives by studying the dynamics of a transnational regulatory field involving numerous government and intergovernmental actors. By means of 34 interviews and 474 archival sources covering a twenty-five year period, we examine public involvement in the development and evolution of private regulatory coalitions addressing sweatshop issues in global supply chains. Our findings disaggregate “government” from a temporal perspective, revealing the organizational and political dynamics that underpin transnational private regulation. We propose a process model of field-level change that takes into account the involvement of public actors over time, and draws attention to the inherent tensions between social policy (labor issues) and trade policy (harmonization of PRIs). These findings also contribute to practice and policy. We discuss the circumstances when the involvement of multiple governments lead to problematic and counterproductive outcomes at the field level and undermines the reasons for government creation of multi-stakeholder roundtables.