Abstract
The UN Global Compact, being an institutional innovation in global governance, invites businesses to voluntarily commit to a selection of principles, rooted in multilateral regimes. Such commitment is expected to improve business practices and by that to close gaps in global governance. This spawns an expectation that through UN Global Compact business and multilateral treaty regimes will engage in mutually fertilizing and potentially coherent interaction to overcome the shortfalls of global governance. The current paper looks into this alleged interaction in the field of water stewardship and access to water. It explores first, the conceptual interdependence of the UN Global Compact and multilateral regimes in the respective fields and second, the ways in which the business practices reported under the UN Global Compact contribute to the advancement of the rules and principles thereof. The paper finds that the traditional multilateral systems and the innovative governance platform share an identical conceptual narrative but exist as separate realities on operational level. From the latter perspective the UN Global Compact might risk deepening governance gaps rather than close them.
Highlights
It is in the democratic deficit, legitimacy crises (Bäckstrand 2006) and in the failure of the UnitedNations (UN) multilateral regimes to account for more meaningful involvement of non-state actors (Kell 2005), that such innovation of global governance as the United Nations Global Compact (UNGlobal Compact) took its roots.The UN Global Compact is framed as a corporate citizenship initiative which invites private economic entities to voluntarily commit to a selection of principles, rooted in multilateral regimes of international governance (Kell and Ruggie 1999; Drache 2001)
The creation of the UN Global Compact spawns an expectation that through the UN Global Compact businesses and multilateral treaty regimes will engage in mutually fertilizing and potentially coherent interaction to overcome the shortfalls of global governance not resolved by state-centric multilateralism
Every institutional innovation in global governance that makes non-state actors more involved with international law is vital for the multilateral regimes and for the best use of their capacities to drive progress
Summary
The UN Global Compact is framed as a corporate citizenship initiative which invites private economic entities to voluntarily commit to a selection of principles, rooted in multilateral regimes of international governance (Kell and Ruggie 1999; Drache 2001). Such commitment is expected to improve business practices that at times have been disruptive to the values sought after by some multilateral regimes. The UN Global Compact is a learning platform under the auspices of the UN that differs from the UN state-centric multilateral regimes in actors, in process and in output. The creation of the UN Global Compact spawns an expectation that through the UN Global Compact businesses and multilateral treaty regimes will engage in mutually fertilizing and potentially coherent interaction to overcome the shortfalls of global governance not resolved by state-centric multilateralism.
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