A field-level perspective on government involvement in private regulation

Abstract

This paper addresses recent calls by various scholars to study the interaction between public and private forms of regulation and the need to bring the state back into transnational private regulation. To date, the involvement of government has generally been conceptualized in the singular – one government with numerous non- state actors. This conceptualization fails to capture the dynamics of the regulatory pluralism that can be witnessed empirically. In many industries the transnational regulatory field is characterized not by one but numerous government actors, often in the pursuit of contradictory policy goals. The present study contributes to the literature on “bringing the state back in to private regulation” by examining and tracing the efforts by numerous governments to shape private regulatory schemes and the consequences of their doing so at the level of the regulatory field.