Ruggie’s Double Movement: Assembling the Private and the Public Through Human Rights Due Diligence

Abstract

ABSTRACT Human rights due diligence (HRDD) is spreading fast as national laws mandating it multiply across the world. It appears that the due diligence process is about to shape the way we regulate the environmental and human rights impacts resulting from economic activities for years to come. While much of the existing scholarship on the topic is focused on HRDD's content and its concrete implications for businesses, this paper takes a step back to investigate its foundations. In particular, it outlines the core intellectual assumptions behind the approach of John G. Ruggie, the former UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, and his embrace of HRDD. The paper suggests that Ruggie's turn to HRDD is grounded in a commitment to a double movement, comprising both the privatisation of the transnational governance of human rights through the empowerment of corporations as governance entities and the publicisation of corporate governance through the introduction of participatory spaces, transparency requirements, and external accountability processes. I argue that the tension between privatisation and publicisation is at the heart of the HRDD process and reflective of Ruggie's ambition to reassemble the private and the public into a new governance approach fitted to economic globalisation.