Role Of Private Actors Research Articles

Supermarkets and private standards: unintended consequences of the audit ritual

Recent scholarship has considered the implications of the rise of voluntary private standards in food and the role of private actors in a rapidly evolving, de-facto ‘mandatory’ sphere of governance. Standards are an important element of this globalising private sphere, but are an element that has been relatively peripheral in analyses of power in agri-food systems. Sociological thought has countered orthodox views of standards as simple tools of measurement, instead understanding their function as a governance mechanism that transforms many things, and people, during processes of standardisation. In a case study of the Australian retail supermarket duopoly and the proprietary standards required for market access this paper foregrounds retailers as standard owners and their role in third-party auditing and certification. Interview data from primary research into Australia’s food standards captures the multifaceted role supermarkets play as standard-owners, who are found to impinge on the independence of third-party certification while enforcing rigorous audit practices. We show how standard owners, in attempting to standardize the audit process, generate tensions within certification practices in a unique example of ritualism around audit. In examining standards to understand power in contemporary food governance, it is shown that retailers are drawn beyond standard-setting into certification and enforcement, that is characterized by a web of institutions and actors whose power to influence outcomes is uneven.

Monitoring the Border: Indonesian Port Security and the Role of Private Actors

Contemporary Southeast Asia (CSEA) is one of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute"s flagship publications. Now in its fourth decade of publication, CSEA has succeeded in building up an international reputation as one of Southeast Asia"s premier academic journals. The aim of the peer reviewed journal is to provide subscribers with up to date and in-depth analysis of critical trends and developments in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region. The primary focus of the journal is on issues related to domestic politics in Southeast Asian countries, regional architecture and community building, military, strategic and security affairs, conflict zones and relations among the Great Powers. CSEA publishes authoritative, insightful and original contributions from scholars, think-tank analysts, journalists and policy-makers from across the globe. The Editorial Committee is guided by the advice of the International Advisory Committee which is composed of eminent scholars from Asia, the United States, Australia and Europe.

Transitions in Food Governance in Europe: From National Towards EU and Global Regulation and from Public Towards Hybrid and Private Forms of Governance

In my paper I discuss two important transitions in food governance in Europe. First, the increased role of private actors in global food safety regulation and the development of retail driven private food safety regulation from the 1990s onwards. Second, the increased role of the European Union. In response to food crisis such as BSE and dioxin, the European Union strengthened its food safety legislation and established the European Food Safety Authority.At the national level, several European countries have established new regulatory agencies or reformed existing agencies to oversee the national food control activities. Both transitions resulted in very complex regulatory arrangements with multiple partners at multiple levels. Governmental organizations have to deal with the new circumstances and new core values such as transparency and independence. How do governmental agencies react to private standard setting?

Innovativeness and Paralysis in International Climate Policy

AbstractThis article describes the challenges of using the constrained tools of international law to negotiate a sustainable framework to address climate change. It sets out to show how the particularities of the problem have led to creative and innovative solutions expanding the borders of international law. To this end, the article discusses carbon market mechanisms, the compliance regime of the Kyoto Protocol, and the emerging framework to create incentives to reduce land-based emissions in developing countries. These examples illustrate that the recognition of the role of sub-national and private entities in mitigating climate change has had significant impact on the rules of the climate regime. But the article also asserts that theunprocess, while recognizing the role of private actors, is still inadequately equipped to involve non-state actors in a meaningful way. The climate regime therefore challenges the traditional thinking about interstate relationships. No longer solely a matter for international environmental law, contemporary environmental governance has become a global affair, which makes the lens of transnational law a useful tool to think about these issues in practice in a more intellectually fruitful and relevant way. This article thereby provides a snapshot of the type of issues and discussion that readers of this journal can look forward to in the years to come.

북한 이탈 주민 정착지원을 위한 협력적 거버넌스 구축

본 연구는 탈북자 정착지원 협력적 거버넌스 구축을 위한 참여주체인 중앙정부, 지방자치단체, 민간단체의 구체적 역할을 논의하기 위해 수행되었다. 중앙정부는 현재 통일부, 행정안전부, 고용노동부, 교육과학기술부, 보건복지부 등 다양한 차원에서 수행되고 있는 기능에 대한 정책조정 기능이 취약하므로 총괄 부서를 지명하고 정책기획, 예산확보 및 배정, 사후평가 및 책임성확보를 담당해야 한다. 지방자치단체는 실질적 서비스를 전달하기 위한 네트워크를 구축하고 관리하는 기능을 담당하기 위해서 의사소통 체널을 확보하고 관계망을 형성하며 다양한 주체들의 집행업무를 조정하는 역할을 담당해야 한다. 민간단체는 전문성을 바탕으로 서비스 개발하고 지역의 자원을 발굴하며 밀착서비스 제공하는 것이 바람직할 것이다. This study was conducted to establish collaborative governance for North Korean Refugees' settlement support service. Three major actors were identified. At the central government level, there is no control center to coordinate various functions. This study suggested three roles for central government in collborative governance, which are policy planning based on public value, allocating financial resources to implementing organizations, and program evaluation for securing public accountability. The rloes of local government are establishing communication channels between implementing participants, maintenancing good relations, and coordination. Finally, the role of private actors is developing high quality service programs, connecting local resources for settlement service.

Private interests and the EU-US dispute on audit regulation: The role of the European accounting profession

ABSTRACT Taking the European audit profession as a case study, our paper explores the role of private actors in transatlantic regulatory relations and transnational regulatory harmonization more generally. In the early twenty-first century, both the US and the EU tightened the regulation of auditors. Due to its extraterritorial effects, the US reform legislation sparked a transatlantic conflict. Seeking mutual recognition of the respective auditor oversight systems, the European Commission endeavored to bring the European regulatory regime closer to the new US model. During the reforms of EU audit regulation, the profession, together with member states, successfully resisted a far-reaching convergence of European regulation to the US model of independent oversight, thus impeding the resolution of the transatlantic conflict. We argue that the profession's defense of the traditional model of European audit regulation results from two intertwined aspects: the profession's interest in keeping a share of power in the regulatory regime and its institutional embeddedness in distinct national and regional regulatory and market structures. In concluding, we discuss the implications of our findings for the relevant international and comparative political economy literature.

Managing corruption risks

ABSTRACT This article investigates the emerging engagement of private actors and specifically Western corporations in international anti-corruption, drawing on Foucauldian studies of governmentality. It explores this engagement as governing practices that have emanated quite independently from the inter-state system commonly understood to be at the core of the anti-corruption regime. It demonstrates how corporate anti-corruption ties in with a relatively new way of perceiving corruption. In this framing, anti-corruption comes out as risk management, which is latched on to notions of corporate social responsibility and business ethics. Moreover, the constitution of corruption risk relates to the rise of new actors and networks engaged in a wider business of anti-corruption, including commercial and hybrid actors that supply corporations with managerial instruments, benchmarks for best practice, rankings, and information and surveillance systems. This facilitates the enrollment of corporations into the anti-corruption cause while cultivating their competitiveness aspirations. The article offers a novel perspective on international anti-corruption and the position of business herein, and in a wider sense, it also contributes discussions about the role of private actors and their micro practices in global governance.

Who Put You in Charge? Private Entrepreneurial Authority in World Politics

This paper presents a new conceptual framework for the study of private authority. I introduce the concept of private entrepreneurial authority where private actors are able to induce deference from others, without ex-ante permission from states to do so. I argue that entrepreneurial authority expands the conceptual and empirical formulation of the role of private actors in world politics, and helps bridge the gap between legalistic approaches to authority that focus on delegation and sociological approaches that focus on legitimacy. This theoretical contribution is critical to understanding the range of variation of private authority. I also present a new longitudinal dataset in the area of environment to describe entrepreneurial authority. I operationalize the concept of entrepreneurial authority by looking specifically at environmental certification schemes, such as “dolphin-safe” tuna or “sustainably harvested” timber. There is a considerable body of literature arguing that private authority is on the rise, yet there is little, if any quantitative data to substantiate this claim. This new dataset, which covers five decades of privately-created environmental standards, is able to engage directly with these arguments using quantitative data rather than single cases. The paper presents findings from these data, and develops hypotheses based on cross-sectoral variation.

Non-state authority and global governance

AbstractNon-state actors are increasingly assuming an active part in the design and construction of the institutional framework of global governance. The introduction of the concept of private authority in the literature has provided us with an insightful analytical tool for a deeper understanding of the role of private actors in the context of global governance. However, in order to achieve this objective the concept of private authority needs to be defined accurately and applied consistently in the examination of non-state governance schemes. This article aims to delineate the concept of private authority in the context of global governance first, by outlining the main characteristics of authority and identifying instances of inconsistent and loose application of these characteristics in the private authority literature and secondly, by offering a starting point for an analytically consistent typology of non-state authority. Following this analysis, a more thoroughly defined and analytically consistent concept of transnationalinauthority is presented. This new conceptualisation locates non-stateinauthority in the amalgamation of public authority and private power in the context of complex transnational governance structures, and can hopefully helps us gain a deeper understanding of the increasing institutionalisation and legitimation of transnational non-state governance.

Courts Without Borders: Domestic Sources of U.S. Extraterritoriality in the Regulatory Sphere

AbstractRegulating private transactions across international boundaries has long posed a challenge to states. Extraterritoriality—the direct regulation of persons and conduct outside a state's borders—is an increasingly common mechanism by which strong states attempt to manage problems associated with transnational activities. This article seeks to account for variation across issues in the willingness of U.S. courts to regulate extraterritorially by focusing on the potential for external conduct to undermine domestic legal rules. It suggests further how attention to domestic-level regulatory processes, with particular focus on the role of private actors, can shed new light on transnational rulemaking and enforcement.

Self-interest or Ideology? The Attitude of Norwegian Medical Specialists towards Private Welfare Services

A striking common characteristic in many Western countries at the turn of the millennium is the debate on the role of private actors in public health care systems. Following the long line of Norwegian political scientists paying attention to attitudes towards privatization, this article uses data from 2005 on medical specialists to investigate their preferences for private welfare services, and to uncover the relative role of political ideology and self-interest in affecting their attitudes. So far, few attempts have been made to test in depth the impact of ideology and self-interest as alternative explanations of the attitudes of a professional group toward a policy issue that is important to its interests. The analysis documents the fact that both public and private specialists display scepticism towards leaving welfare services in the hands of private actors. The empirical model for the multivariate analysis builds on the large body of literature on political attitudes, and incorporates variables that are derived from economic and psychological theories in order to test the impact of ideology and subjective self-interest (emphasis on high salary for job satisfaction) and objective self-interest (private economy). In addition, the model also controls for a vector of individual characteristics and professional background. For the group of full-time public specialists, both subjective and objective self-interest, together with ideology, turns out to be the major determinants of view on private welfare services. The attitudes of the private specialists are, on the other hand, not at all affected by self-interest – only by ideology.

Financial Integration in the EU: the First Phase of EU Endorsement of International Accounting Standards*

AbstractIn 2002 the EU adopted the Regulation which required European listed companies to prepare their consolidated accounts in accordance with international accounting standards from 2005 onwards. A novel set of structures for the endorsement of international accounting standards for use in the EU was put in place. This article examines the first phase of endorsement of international accounting standards in the context of the novel endorsement structures. The article concludes that problems over the endorsement of IAS 39 Financial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement reveals a number of significant policy implications for the EU including the difficulty of forming a European view, the role of private actors in EU regulation, and the issue that international standards largely reflect Anglo‐Saxon accounting practices rather than continental European practices.

IASL – IISL International and Interdisciplinary Workshop on Policy and Law Relating to Outer Space Resources: The Example of the Moon, Mars and Other Celestial Bodies

It is a report on workshop on policy and law relating to outer space resources which took place at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada in June 2006. The workshop was divided into five sessions: Session 1: State-of-the-art technologies and international cooperation. Session 2: The role of private actors. Session 3: Environmental concerns. Session 4: The adequacy of the current legal and regulatory framework. Session 5: the acceptability of the Moon agreement and the road ahead.

Bringing the Private Into the Public

Substantial policy and political changes have resulted from a 2001 state takeover of the Philadelphia School District and the subsequent hiring of Paul Vallas as the district’s new CEO. Using the lens of urban regime analysis, which emphasizes the importance of public and private actors in forming a governing coalition, this article analyzes the Philadelphia education regime and the policies it has promoted. The author determines that although decision making is highly centralized under this governing coalition, the role of private actors helps to define the regime as a “contracting regime,” in which public-private interaction shapes the political and policy context.

Le rôle des acteurs privés dans les processus de régulation : participation, autorégulation et régulation privée

The Role of Private Actors in Regulation Processes : Participation, Self-Regulation, and Private Regulation The recent development of private participation in regulatory activity must be understood as the advent of new models of rulemaking cooperations : co-regulation, delegated regulation, and recognized private regulation. These models reflect new convergences between regulation — usually considered in the public interest — and self regulation. On the basis of this observation, the author calls for the building of a new regulation law integrating these changes and redefining the distinction between public and private law.

Avoiding the "G" Word in International Governance

Common Goods: Reinventing European and International Governance. Edited by Adrienne Heritier. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. 353 pp., $74.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-1700-4), $29.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-1701-2) Common Goods: Reinventing European and International Governance addresses both theoretical and practical concerns. It cuts across many conceptual realms. It is, therefore, difficult to set within the context of a single academic literature. From a practical standpoint, Common Goods contains a number of policy-oriented chapters that make useful contributions to the field of European policies and policymaking and to the literature on the role of private actors in global governance. Of particular importance is the discussion of the role of bond rating agencies in the new global finance. Yet the volume clearly addresses a specialist audience, composed mainly of scholars interested in analyzing collective action problems through an institutionalist approach. The style and content are very technical and, therefore, unlikely to be suitable for classroom use. Some contributions contain formal models. From a …

Les instruments juridiques de la protection des intérêts diffus et des biens collectifs :

SUMMARY LEGAL INSTRUMENTS FOR THE PROTECTION OF DIFFUSE INTERESTS AND COLLECTIVE GOODS : THE ROLE OF PRIVATE ACTORS AND THE RETURN OF PUBLIC POWER This paper starts with the presentation of a few venues for a research programme. Contemporary and comparative legal history could try and find out more about the correlation between globalisation, regionalisation (especially European integration) and the loss of impact of notions such as the general interest as a standard for legislators and judges, and their substitution by more sophisticated techniques. The most promising fields to be covered appear to be the regulation of public utilities, environmental law, and the rules on liability relating to the exercise of public authority. The paper then tries to examine to what extent the traditional mechanisms of diplomatic protection remain central in the adjudication of global transnational and international issues. National governments, and especially Foreign Ministries or Trade Representatives continue to play a major role in representing interests, thus limiting access to global adjudication to those interests who are able to directly obtain it on the domestic level. A comparison between Section 301 of the 1974 US Trade Act and the 1994 EU Trade Barriers Regulation draws attention to the specific advantages of mechanisms that are being built and implemented at regional rather than domestic level. The paper then tries to deepen the analyses of the issues concerning access to justice in the context of globalisation : to what extent can remedies be made available to individuals and for the protection of diffuse interests ? The experiences of the EU judicial system on the one hand, and,on the other, with the recently adopted Arhus Convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters show how domestic judiciaries can be involved in becoming the judges of globalisation issues. Rather than focusing on establishing global institutions for the solution of legal issues, thinking about how to relate the institutions of different legal systems to one another appears to be a promising way forward.

Education and Health: A Role for Private Actors in Meeting Human Rights Obligations?

Increasingly, including in developing countries, the private sector impacts significantly on rights to education and the highest attainable standard of health. How, though, can a state ensure that this is a positive impact? And, if a violation of rights does occur, how should culpability be divided between the state and the private sector? The increasing justiciability of economic and social rights, together with moves at the international level to develop a rights-based accountability for private actors, suggests that the sector may soon assume legal responsibilities, in line with the expansion of human rights from its classical concern of action by the state.

Individual strategies and job chances--a comparative perspective

One of the prevailing features of the reorganization of the welfare state is a larger emphasis on the role of private actors. Moreover, there is a clear shift away from social rights towards obligations, incentives and sanctions. The empirical evidence of what kind of behaviour or strategy that leads to employment is, however, contradictory and seems largely to be based on data from different countries with different causal configurations. This comparative study seeks to analyse the relationship between different forms of individual strategies and chances of re-employment among young unemployed people in six Northern European countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Scotland and Sweden. It shows that young people experience different contexts and that the influence of individual strategies on re-employment prospects is highly structured by economical and societal constraints. Hence, it is important to look beyond individual performance and acknowledge the structural factors which exclude people from being included in the labour market.

Private Actors on the Rise? The Role of Non-State Actors in Compliance with International Institutions

(Transnational) private actors have a significant role in 'global governance'. But their influence varies significantly, both across time and issues. The major challenge for theorizing about non-state actors in world politics is not only to demonstrate that they matter but explain where, when, and how they matter. This paper takes issue with these challenges by looking at the role of private actors in compliance with international institutions. The first part of the paper clarifies the concept of compliance and the distinction made between public and private actors. The second part reviews prominent approaches to compliance in the International Relations literature. I distinguish them, first, according to the relative weight they attribute to private actors in compliance, and second, according to the causal mechanisms through which compliance is induced granting private actors different ways for influencing compliance. Taking 'misfit' as a precondition of non-compliance, I derive 11 hypotheses about state compliance with inconvenient international rules, which specify different causal mechanisms through which state actors, international institutions, and private actors, respectively, impact on compliance. The final part of the paper discusses the EU as a critical case for testing compliance theories.