Private Governance as Public Policy: A Paradigmatic Shift

Abstract

Private governance and a variant, public-private governance, produce a significant portion of the rules that govern citizens’ lives day-to-day. Yet political science has not paid sufficient attention to the full array of governance arrangements (beyond formal government) that impress themselves on the lives of ordinary people. Why not, why is this matter important, and what is the appropriate response to this deficiency? The conceptual framework within which practitioners work and the language they use—specifically, using the phrase “public policy” to refer exclusively to policy made by government—unduly limit the scope of political science. Those who do study policymaking activities of private groups encounter a conceptual and linguistic poverty that constrains their work. A recounting of a particular study of private governance in the global arena demonstrates the insufficiency of language as it is currently deployed. An extended example in the area of pension accounting, a highly technical field, is used to establish the fundamentally public nature of the policy work of private groups like the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board. Political scientists, as students of democracy, accountability, and power, are uniquely trained to study private governance and should work to reconceptualize the discipline's guiding framework fully to incorporate this important phenomenon within its purview