Private Authority Research Articles

Redundancies, layers, and dilemmas: Comparing private standards and public regulations in lithium mining

An expanding array of transnational Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards has emerged to mitigate harms across critical minerals supply chains. This proliferation of international, private governance standards is interacting with domestic, public regulations guiding mining activity in resource rich states. When private and public requirements duplicate, overlap, or diverge they can create inconsistent processes, administrative burden, and dilemmas through a patchwork of basic components in supply chain management (Cashore et al., 2021). Applying a typology of interactions between private authority and public policy to lithium mining in Argentina, we argue that private/public rules are loosely complementary in some respects and independently coexisting in others. Comparing a rigorous private standard, the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), to public regulations we find that both include similar provisions for environmental protection and public participation . IRMA provides better protections for indigenous peoples’ participation, though it lacks significant enforcement mechanisms. Questions remain over the private sector's ability to guarantee – in practice – the rights of indigenous and other affected communities, or to protect ecosystems in the rush for critical minerals. Resulting governance dilemmas illustrate an increasingly crowded regulatory space in lithium mining that indiscriminately presumes public regulatory gaps, while it privatizes accountability.

Pushing the bar – elite law firms and the rise of international commercial courts in the world economy

In the last thirty years, international commercial courts (ICCs) have emerged around the world. ICCs offer adjudication in international commercial disputes. They are not creatures of international law – as their name may suggest – but specialized domestic courts embedded in national legal orders. The rise of ICCs is remarkable in that scholars expected commercial arbitration to gradually displace litigation in the twenty first century. What drives the creation of ICCs? Legal research suggests that ICCs are a manifestation of a new era of assertive unilateralism in global governance. Scholars point to states’ geopolitical motives, backlashes against private authority in the form of arbitration, and economic statecraft. Drawing on the New Interdependence Approach, this study argues that most ICCs are the result of policy entrepreneurship of elite law firms in the pursuit of growing the global market for commercial litigation. Depending on the legal-political context, they forge coalitions with domestic judiciaries or political leaders to advance ICC projects. The study highlights deep-rooted changes in the global dispute resolution landscape, the important role of commercial law in International Political Economy (IPE), and points to the mostly overlooked significance of law firms and judiciaries as architects of global economic governance.

Law, knowledge and space: Expertise across the legal geographies of green finance

The mechanisms of green finance are structured and made enforceable through law. However, the legal geographies of green finance are not distributed evenly but are scattered across multiple sites of public and private authority and associated forms of legal expertise. This article investigates how legal technologies and knowledge practices shape the efficacy of green finance. Green finance rests on ‘asset coding’ as a socio-legal practice that is transnational yet rooted in few, salient sovereign jurisdictions and legal templates originating in the social spaces of transnational legal expertise. Through synthesizing literature from political economy, socio-legal studies and economic geography and building on a range of explorative interviews and documents, I suggest that underlying knowledge practices and legal technologies of ‘green asset coding’ contain important continuities with the way assets are coded into capital in conventional finance. This can constrain the efficacy and potential of green finance. The article outlines these continuities across three domains: Energy infrastructures, voluntary carbon markets, and ‘green’ offshore jurisdictions. Taking these continuities seriously invites for further critical international political economy (IPE) research in the nexus between law, finance, and the state, and underscores the need for transformative legal practices to achieve decarbonization at the pace needed.

The Intersections of Public Rights and Private Rules: An Analysis of Human Rights in Forestry and Fisheries Certification Standards

AbstractThis article systematically evaluates whether, how, and to what extent twelve prominent forestry and fisheries certification schemes address human rights in their standards. In line with the broader cross-fertilization of the fields of international human rights and environmental law and policy, our results demonstrate that human rights norms and considerations – primarily Indigenous, labour, and procedural rights – are increasingly reflected in the rulemaking of these schemes. At the same time, our analysis also demonstrates the mixed and underwhelming performance of certification standards in protecting human rights norms, including those relating to women, children, racialized and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, workers, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, and peasants and rural peoples. Through descriptive statistics, we also show that levels of human rights adherence vary significantly across schemes and that standards developed in the forestry sector tend to outperform those for fisheries. Our methodology and results add a new dimension to efforts to assess the stringency, equity, and legitimacy of private authority in the environmental field.

NGOs and Global Business Regulation of Transnational Alcohol and Ultra-Processed Food Industries

Abstract The intensification of efforts by state and nonstate actors to address issues affecting global health has produced a patchwork of transnational regulatory governance. Within this field, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are expected to perform authoritative roles in holding business actors to account and enhance the democratic legitimacy of institutions via their participation in governance processes. While there exists a large body of conceptual and empirical research on global business regulation and private authority, we surprisingly know little about the governance functions of NGOs engaged in influencing the practices of corporations that produce health-harming commodities. This knowledge gap is especially pronounced in the issue area of noncommunicable diseases. This article begins to address this gap by mapping the networks of NGOs that engage in regulatory activities (rule-setting, monitoring, and enforcement) related to the (ultra)processed food and alcohol industries. We identify the networks of NGOs involved in global policy making across health, regulatory standards, and multistakeholder initiatives using nonstate actor submissions to consultations held by World Health Organization, UN Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex), and the UN Global Compact. This paper examines NGO governance functions and their patterns of engagement and participation across institutional spheres. Overall, the article makes a twofold contribution to existing debates. First, we identify the governance functions through which NGOs attempt to hold corporations to account, contrasting their “watchdog” function with other governance functions. Second, we examine the representation of NGOs, highlighting asymmetries in participation of NGOs in the Global North and South.

Evaluating Financial Support of Governmental Institutions and Private Banks to SMEs and Farmers: Case of Tokat City

Small–medium enterprises (SMEs) are one of the essential building blocks of the economy in every country. The ratio of these enterprises to employment is very high. The number of studies dealing with loans and grants efficiency or exploring problems in reaching funds is limited. In addition, there is no study comparing governmental and private loans and funds, and no study explicitly focusing on the Tokat region to explore the issues in the loan and funds mechanism. This study evaluates the financial support of governmental authorities and private banks to SMEs using the SERVQUAL scale in five dimensions. First, the method is applied to structured surveys with SMEs and farmers in Tokat. In this regard, financial support is defined as a service evaluated by a gap analysis. As a result, we show a lack of empathy and efficient communication between SMEs and supporting authorities, namely between KOSGEB and SMEs and between private banks and SMEs. The study is unique in bringing farmers and SMEs together and raising voices on the problems not mentioned previously by governmental and private authorities.

Subsidiary and the structure of property law

This article provides an account of the structure of property law based on the principle of subsidiarity. This principle holds that more centralized organizations, including governments, should fulfil a subsidiary role in relation to the individuals and groups of which they are comprised. While subsidiarity has been highly influential in the areas of public law, constitutional law, and international law, its relevance to property law has been underappreciated. Property rights distribute decision-making authority over resources to non-state parties. This promotes a number of interrelated benefits associated with subsidiarity, including the qualitatively distinct contributions made by individuals and groups to the common good, the instrumental benefits of decentralized decision-making, the intrinsic benefits of involvement in actions and decisions affecting oneself, and the development of virtues. However, the principle of subsidiarity also suggests important roles for public authorities, including assuring an appropriate distribution of resources in society and intervening where the private authority of owners fails to uphold the common good. In this respect, subsidiarity offers a distinctive understanding of the divide between private and public law. Private law doctrine appropriately provides owners with a significant sphere of presumptive authority, yet this is subject to broad powers of public authorities to alter the baseline where, in their judgment, the common good requires it. This article argues that the concept of subsidiarity can help to bridge the divide between progressive property theory and theoretical approaches that emphasize the authority of owners. It can also contribute to an understanding of the concept of property, public access rights to private property, property-based community governance, and legal protections for property rights.

Cosmetic company commitment to the international organization for standardization (ISO) as a private authority regime

This research discusses the ISO private authority regime with a focus on the ISO 14001 series issues regarding the environmental management system at the cosmetics company The Body Shop. The aim of this research is to determine the commitment of The Body Shop through policies as a form of company compliance with the international private regime and its contribution achievements. This research analysis uses concepts International Private Regime and Institutional Theory with descriptive methods of qualitative data analysis collected through documentation study techniques. The results of this research found that the ISO 14001 standard is an international private regime that regulates management systems environment is not a standard of technical performance in companies. In this way, The Body Shop's commitment to ISO 14001 is proven through the existence of a circular economy policy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions towards net zero carbon, to policies related to company design and product raw materials used in order to minimize environmental impacts. This shows that The Body Shop has a high commitment to implementing ISO 14001 standards in its business activities green corporate.

Enslavement for Manumission: The Creation of Byzantine ‘Private Subjects’

ABSTRACT The article challenges current perspectives on slavery as ‘unfreedom’ and proposes to examine the enslaved within a socio-political dynamics of power relations. An analysis of four Byzantine documents from the eleventh century and the place they accorded to slaves and manumitted slaves reveals the way enslavement and manumission served together as a means to acquire socioeconomic independence and private authority by turning the enslaved persons into private subjects: men and women exclusively subordinated to the authority of their owners. Private authority was based on a total subordination towards the enslaver and challenged the public imperial authority over people. An analysis of the place accorded to slaves and manumitted slaves in the private domain as seen from juridical and economic documents from the central Middle Ages from different regions of the Byzantine Empire shows slaves as social capital and slavery as a means to gain socioeconomic independence as part of the power game in a medieval society.

Transnational economic activism and private regulatory power

ABSTRACT Private bodies involved in global regulatory governance shape and monitor economic behaviour. Their regulatory power has greatly increased over the last several decades. Thanks to an impressive apparatus of standard-setting, they have transformed economic activity. The dominance of private bodies in standard-setting has continued despite crises to which they themselves have contributed. Existing literature suggests that the State ‘orchestrates’ private regulatory activity, thereby retaining a high level of control. Yet, this article shows that the opposite has occurred: crises, broadly defined as disruptive events, make private bodies more resilient or generate new transnational ones. The lack of State control has ushered in a new era of private authority. Private bodies use crises as opportunities to reorganize and become more assertive in norm-creation, overriding and substituting State powers. Free from organizational hierarchies, formal accountability structures, scrutiny, pressure, and obligations, private bodies expand their regulatory domain, enhance their collective memory and identity, and grow stronger through crises. Future empirical work on the interaction between public regulatory and supervisory authorities and private rule-makers can make a difference in ensuring that private rule-making serves the public interest.

Private Authority: INTERPOL Involvement in Malaysia's Political Case

This paper elaborates on the private authority which is focused on INTERPOL. Private authority is when nonstate actors create laws or norms that other important actors in international politics accept. There are three sources of authority which are market, moral and illicit authority. The aim of INTERPOL’s establishment is to combat international crimes and facilitates international police collaboration and communication. The writer would like to discuss about “does INTERPOL exacerbate or ameliorate interstate conflict?”. The thesis statement is INTERPOL ameliorate interstate conflict through the cooperation between its member states. INTERPOL usually acts as the middleman that provides information needed by the member states and also assists member states in arresting suspects. Through this paper, the writer will also state the case in which INTERPOL involve in Malaysia. This study will focus on the year 2006 until 2017. The year 2006 was chosen as it was the start of the Altantuya Shariibuu’s case and the year 2017 was chosen as it was the latest year the case of 1MDB was discussed. These two cases were high-profile political case in Malaysia as it is said to involve Najib Razak, the former prime minister of Malaysia. Malaysia was chosen because through these two cases we can see the active involvement of INTERPOL as the private authority that helps its member state in solving the crime by offering a hand. Keywords: international political economy, INTERPOL, Malaysia, member states, private authority

Economic Consequences of Land Fragmentation on Farm Production: Empirical Evidences from Bangladesh

This study examines the impact of land fragmentation on farm productivity in northern Bangladesh. To achieve that objective, primary data were collected from 193 farm households through a direct interview method from Mymensingh and Dinajpur districts. A combination of analytical tools was employed like perception index, fragmentation index, Simpson index and multiple linear regression model. Most of the farm lands in the study area were severely fragmented. The decreasing rate of average farm size was more prevalent for those farmers whose lands were less fragmented. Moreover, farmers, having more fragmented land, incurred more costs in farm production. Regression results revealed that the number of parcels, average plot size and average distance from plots to homestead were found to have significant negative impact on rice production. Policy implications include developing effective land consolidations program by the spread of commercialization of farming by public or private authority and spread of mechanization through machine service providers at the local level and creating employment opportunities to release pressure on the land.

Public-Private Drift and the Shattering Polity

Abstract This paper approaches the public-private law problem by describing what it calls “drift.” Drift is the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be private law to become public (public drift), and the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be public law to become private (private drift). Though it is possible to distinguish public and private drift conceptually, drift is in practice a unified phenomenon: public and private drift go together. Drift is manifested not only in formal, legal developments, but also in the informal processes by which public law frameworks now influence private ordering, private rulemaking, and private relationships, as well as the way private authorities have been entrusted with the responsibility to implement those public law frameworks. The paper describes various contemporary examples of drift, explains drift’s comparative ascendancy today, and speculates about possible future developments for drift. Drift in public and private law may not be driven primarily by anything innate or conceptually necessary in the disciplines believed to constitute private or public law. Drift is instead a political byproduct, the issue of social and cultural anxieties concerning the absence of anything like a common political project, anxieties that drive powerful actors toward manufacturing imaginary commonalities that they press with confounding certitude. The powerful exploit and manipulate areas of law that properly pertain to the public and private domains, repurposing them for new uses, because their regular use is ineffective in achieving their political objectives. The paper deliberately selects examples of drift that exhibit what would be conventionally described as conservative and progressive valences (in the meteoric rise of public nuisance, in the strategy of statutes like Texas’ S.B. 8, in the mixed public-private response to COVID-19, in the controversies about social media speech control, and others) to illustrate the universality of the phenomenon. Drift is a response to a perceived political void or emptiness in which public-private partnerships of powerful actors emerge to fill the void, capture the institutions of power, and coerce people’s behavior into certain ideological grooves.

In search of legitimacy: covid-19, education policy response and the emergence of ‘digital compradors’ in Georgia

ABSTRACT Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper draws on theoretical concepts from political science and comparative education to explore policy-makers’ responses to COVID-19 in Georgia. The findings show how the Ministry of Education of Georgia has sought external endorsements from global actors – Microsoft Corporation and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – as legitimising authorities to claim policy effectiveness domestically. The findings indicate that in a political environment with low public support for the government, this approach has contributed to further deepening of public discontent. Moreover, such external endorsements have created conflicts of interest, as private authorities in education have acted simultaneously as policy advocates and service providers. The changed role of a government in creating markets through public–private partnerships (PPPs) and serving the business interests is a well-studied phenomenon. This paper goes beyond documenting policy influences and the growing role of businesses in education by considering the additional roles that corporations play: endorsers and legitimators of education policies. The pandemic accelerated the digitalisation of education and created even bigger markets promoted by governments in exchange for external political support. Finally, the paper offers a new analytic term ‘digital compradors’ and conceptualises this emerging phenomenon in relation to PPP.

Analysis of the work quality and productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic

Paper aims This paper analyzes the work quality and productivity of during the COVID-19 pandemic from five Brazilian regions with three work models: face-to-face, virtual and workshiting. Originality Despite the number of studies on COVID-19 since the pandemic’s beginning, the literature lacks research that demonstrates relationships between productivity and the emergence of problems, illnesses, and adverse situations that compromise worker performance in the routines of these three work models. Research method The study used an experimental, descriptive, and transversal research design, without identification data Southeast of the participant, as anonymous and exclusive research, with 801 participants from different regions of Brazil (North, Northeast, Midwest, Northeast, and South), with different age groups. The work consisted of work issues focusing on the quality of work pandemic, for issues of analysis of time and productivity problems. The questions were about health issues in 6 parts of the study: mental demographics and increased sleep quality, fear of SARS-CoV-2, exercise, stress, and productivity. Main findings There was a strong significant relationship between the three work models and five variables: area of activity, work equipment used during quarantine, diseases found during the pandemic, problems reported during quarantine pandemic like sleep, stress, workload performed, and future expectations regarding the work performed and the pandemic. Significant relationships were also found with diseases before the pandemic, those perceived and reported during the pandemic period studied, and the sleep profile before and during. The statistical significance relationship was also strong between the areas of work audience and new diseases during the pandemic. Implications for theory and practice The research practically validates several other theoretical studies, with guidelines for the scientific community on work behavior for the three work models. The results, together with the relationships found by the statistical analysis of the p-value of the variables, help the public and private authorities to understand and rethink preventive measures in the emergence of new diseases and the optimization of work operations without compromising their quality and productivity.

Evolutionary dynamics of transnational private regulation

ABSTRACT This article puts forward an approach to account for the evolution of transnational private rule-makers. Morphing of organisations, procedures, and rules is suggested as a key strength of various forms of private authority. Directing attention towards evolutionary dynamics, and their impact on the goals pursued by transnational private regulators, as well as on the implications for targets and beneficiaries of their rules, brings forward various implications of transnational private regulators. These implications include tensions between the complementary and competitive relations between public and private authority, and question the capacity of the former to effectively enrol, steer and influence the latter. The article discusses the role of regulatory and organisational crises as catalysts for the emergence and evolution of transnational private rule-makers, and how crises affect the relation between public and private regimes. Finally, we reflect on possible competitive challenges that emerge by employing a dynamic perspective to transnational private regulation.

Public administration and political science: From monogamous marriage to professional partnership

Public administration and political science: From monogamous marriage to professional partnership

Business authority in global governance: Companies beyond public and private roles

International studies investigate the governance authority of state versus non-state actors in terms of their public or private authority. However, the public–private distinction does not sufficiently capture the variety of governance actors, or the forms of their authority, beyond that distinction. Focussing on businesses, this paper argues that certain governance actors assume public and private roles, as well as a third category of roles it calls ‘societal’ that transcend notions of public and private. To understand these roles and how they affect governance authority, this paper treats the public–private relationship as mediated and extends it with the ‘societal’ category, then translates it into the concept of business authority, which constitutes a particular form of governance authority alongside public and private authority. It does so by operationalising governance authority as a triadic concept composed of power, legitimacy and a connection to public interests. In all three components, business authority escapes the binary distinction between public and private without simply merging the two.

Distributing the costs of change: property transitions and pacts

In A Liberal Theory of Property (2021), Hanoch Dagan makes an important, thought-provoking contribution to property theory – one that unifies divergent, and at time apparently dichotomous, strands of thought in property theory and revives rich dormant ideas. Dagan persuasively centres property's justification and design on the value of autonomy and on the basic need for reciprocal recognition of the individual right to self-determination. He does so without excluding the relevance and significance of other property values, both public and private. The theory deepens existing debates within property scholarship about values such as freedom and personhood, and provides a wide-reaching analysis of how autonomy functions as property's telos. That telos is used to justify structural pluralism in property law and to delimit owners’ rights. In this way, for Dagan, property's justification determines the nature and ambit of private authority over resources.

Evaluating good practices for the promotion of electromobility using multi criteria analysis methods

Electromobility and alternative fuels are considered to be significant players towards the reduction of energy consumption and emissions produced by road transportation sector. Governments, municipalities, public and private authorities, and institutions take significant steps for promoting these technologies by adopting effective, efficient and targeted measures and actions, named as Good Practices. The aim of this work is to develop and present a methodology for evaluating Good Practices based on predefined criteria, using Multi criteria Decision Analysis techniques. For this purpose, 20 Good Practices implemented in 9 European Regions aiming at diffusing electromobility were selected for applying the proposed methodology. More specifically, the selected practices were evaluated by regional groups of experts based on 6 criteria: relative advantage, environmental benefit, energy systems, awareness, vehicle performance and ease of use. Followingly, the Analytical Hierarchy Process was applied for estimating the weights of these criteria while the Weighted Sum Model was then used for calculating the final score and rank the Good Practices accordingly. The results showed that practices offering significant environmental benefits and improved energy systems received higher scores than those contributing in raising public awareness or proving an advantage of electric vehicles over the conventional ones. The results of this work are further analyzed and discussed.