Abstract
Like any regulatory effort, private transnational standard-setters need to legitimate themselves to the audiences from which they seek support or obedience. While early scholarship on private transnational governance has emphasized the centrality of <em>democratic</em> legitimation narratives in rendering private governance socially acceptable, evidence from more recent standard-setting schemes suggests a declining relevance of that narrative over time. In my analysis of private sustainability regulation, I identify a combination of two factors that jointly contribute to this diminished role of democratic legitimation. First, private transnational governance has become a pervasive phenomenon. This means that new entrants to the field no longer face the same liability of newness that required first movers to make an extra effort in legitimation. Second, private standard-setting has moved from areas characterized by ‘governance gaps’ to areas in which meaningful intergovernmental regulation already exists. In these areas, however, the ‘state prerogative’ in legitimating governance holds. As a result, transnational standard-setters rely not so much on stressing their democratic credentials, but instead emphasize their contribution to achieving internationally agreed goals.
Highlights
In the 1990s, private transnational regulation was the proverbial new kid on the block
Observers saw world politics at a ‘bifurcation’, as the state-centric world of world politics was increasingly complemented, if not replaced, by a ‘multi-centric’ world of world politics in which private actors carved out spheres of authority for often very specific issues (Biersteker & Hall, 2002; Cutler, Haufler, & Porter, 1999; Haufler, 1993; Rosenau, 1990, 1995; Wapner, 1995)
Private transnational sustainability governance made its initial mark in global governance by successfully claiming that its decision-making procedures were based on ‘democratic’ or ‘democracy-like’ foundations—a claim that seems to have become less central as the field became more mature, more well-known, and more densely populated
Summary
In the 1990s, private transnational regulation was the proverbial new kid on the block. In the new field of Internet governance, a private organization like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers became a key regulator; and even in international security, private companies offering security and military services had come to engage in meaningful self-regulation across borders (Krahmann, 2017). Taken together, these developments suggested that private transnational regulation had moved significantly beyond its traditional confines of the transnational merchant rules—the lex mercatoria—and global sports governance—the lex sportiva (Wolf, 2017)—to become a key part of ‘global governance’ (Dingwerth & Pattberg, 2006; Rosenau, 1995; Whitman, 2009). Once private regulation had become more widely recognized as a legitimate field of global governance and once its role within the broader landscape of global governance largely was taken for granted, legitimation pressures weakened and democratic legitimation became less central
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