Errol Meidinger

Transnational Business Governance Interactions: Conceptualization and Framework for Analysis

This special issue demonstrates the importance of interactions in transnational business governance. The number of schemes applying non-state authority to govern business conduct across borders has vastly expanded in numerous issue areas. As these initiatives proliferate, they increasingly interact with one another and with state-based regimes. The key challenge is to understand the implications of these interactions for regulatory capacity and performance, and ultimately for social and environmental impact. In this introduction, we propose an analytical framework for the study of transnational business governance interactions. The framework disaggregates the regulatory process to identify potential points of interaction, and suggests analytical questions that probe the key features of interactions at each point.

Social Impact Assessment as Evaluation Research Claimants and Claims

The emerging practice of social impact assessment (SIA) faces a number of difficult methodological and operational questions. One way of addressing them is to look to the experience of the more developed field of evaluation research (ER). The convergences with and extensions of ER by SIA pose the questions addressed by this article. It argues among other things: (1) until the existing problems of essentially ex post ER are more adequately understood and resolved it may be untenable to continue some of the ex ante pretensions current in SIA; (2) because of a larger private sector role and agency mission orientations, SIA may be even more plagued with one-sided research the ER These and other issues are critically examined, and a number of possible responses suggested.

Forest Certification in Developing and Transitioning Countries: Part of a Sustainable Future?

This paper examines and analyzes trends in forest in forest management in developing and transitional economies in order to broaden the reach of critical issues. Data collected on biodiversity, species decline, and deforestation reveal widespread deterioration of forest ecosystem structure and function, including the acceleration of forest exploitation as well as uncertainty about where global trends in domestic forest sectors are headed. However, two significant trends were observed: (1) the intense competition between the Forest Stewardship Council and industry-initiated certification programs; and (2) North America and Europe have the most support for and battles about forest certification. Forest certification is best understood as part of a larger ensemble of forest management institutions, which, if aligned correctly, could significantly help to improve sustainable forest management and conserve biodiversity

Beyond Westphalia: Competitive Legalization in Emerging Transnational Regulatory Systems

This paper analyzes several emerging transnational regulatory systems that engage, but are not centered on state legal systems. Driven primarily by civil society organizations, the new regulatory systems use conventional technical standard setting and certification techniques to establish market-leveraged, social and environmental regulatory programs. These programs resemble state regulatory programs in many important respects, and are increasingly legalized. Individual sectors generally have multiple regulatory programs that compete with, but also mimic and reinforce each other. While forestry is the most developed example, similar patterns are evident in agriculture, fisheries, apparel, and mining, among other sectors.The paper describes the institutional structures and routines of the new regulatory systems, their interactions with state based systems, and some possible broader implications for law and society. Among other things, it notes that the emerging regulatory systems permeate their sectors with increasingly broad and deep rule systems and seek to remain highly dynamic at the same time. The paper closes with a brief discussion of whether the systems might be sketching the outlines of new forms of transnational democracy.

Forest Certification and Democracy

This paper explores the possibility that forest certification represents an important emerging form of transnational democracy. Because it is largely driven and administered by nonstate actors, forest certification can be seen as suffering a democracy deficit. However, because it stresses broad participation, intensive deliberative procedures, responsiveness to state law and widely accepted norms, and competition among regulatory programs to achieve effective implementation and widespread public acceptance, forest certification appears to stand up relatively well under generally understood criteria for democratic governance. Nonetheless, a more satisfactory evaluation will require a better understanding of how responsive certification programs are to diverse, emergent constituencies as well as which certification programs win regulatory competitions, and why.

The New Environmental Law: Forest Certification

Conference on Social and Political Dim ensions of Fo rest Certification , University of Freiburg, Germany, June 20-22, 2001. Portions of the paper are forthcoming under different titles in Erro l Meiding er, Chris Ellio tt, and Gerhard O esten, eds., Social and Poli t ical Dimensions of Forest Certification, 2003. Comments by the participants in the Freiburg Conference, the Sustainable Environmental Law Conference at SUNY-Buffalo, the Law Faculty Workshop at SUNY-Buffalo, and the Harrison Program on the Glo bal Future a t the University of Maryland were very helpful in developing the paper. Special than ks to David Westb rook, Alex Ziegert, and Karol So ltan for their thou ghtful critiques, and to Adam R izzo and T atania Vostok for research assistance. This paper was made possible by research funding from the Baldy C enter for Law and Soc ial Policy, State University of New York at Buffalo, for w hich the autho r is most grateful.

Protect, Respect, Remedy and Participate: ‘New Governance’ Lessons for the Ruggie Framework

This piece addresses the legacy of Harvard Professor John Gerard Ruggie’s work as the first UN Special Representative to the Secretary General (SRSG) on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations, a UN mandate he held from 2005-2011. In it, we interrogate the theoretical underpinnings of the conceptual and policy framework for addressing human rights abuse in the business context that Professor Ruggie has endorsed as SRSG and query whether a conceptually and operationally more effective framework might have been produced had Ruggie and his team approached the task from a new governance or new accountability perspective. After situating Ruggie’s work within a sociological institutionalist perspective to system transformation, we describe the key insights offered by new governance approaches for the construction of effective governance and accountability regimes – including those of expanded stakeholder participation, the addition of new kinds of non-traditional processes for holding social actors to account, and the role of orchestration in promoting learning and experimentation across sectors and individual governance entities. Taking these insights into account, we conclude that Ruggie’s “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” framework would have been significantly strengthened by the addition of a fourth “Participation” pillar. That pillar would have acknowledged the critical role that civil society actors play at all levels of global governance today and, importantly, provided a firm normative foundation for such actors to insist on direct participation in the monitoring, enforcement, and implementation of the diverse array of policies and practices that affect the enjoyment of human rights in the business context.