Kate Macdonald

Pathways to global democracy? Escaping the statist imaginary

Critics of global democracy have often claimed that the social and political conditions necessary for democracy to function are not met at the global level, and are unlikely to be in the foreseeable future. Such claims are usually developed with reference to national democratic institutions, and the social conditions within national democratic societies that have proved important in sustaining them. Although advocates of global democracy have contested such sceptical conclusions, they have tended to accept the method of reasoning from national to global contexts on which they are based. This article critiques this method of argument, showing that it is both highly idealised in its characterisation of national democratic practice, and overly state-centric in its assumptions about possible institutional forms that global democracy might take. We suggest that if aspiring global democrats – and their critics – are to derive useful lessons from social struggles to create and sustain democracy within nation states, a less idealised and institutionally prescriptive approach to drawing global lessons from national experience is required. We illustrate one possible such approach with reference to cases from both national and global levels, in which imperfect yet meaningful democratic practices have survived under highly inhospitable – and widely varying – conditions.

The role of beneficiaries in transnational regulatory processes

The editors of this volume highlight the role of intermediaries, alongside regulators and targets, as a way to better understand the outcomes of regulatory processes. Here, we explore the benefits of distinguishing a fourth category of actors: the groups whose interests the rules are meant to protect, the (intended) beneficiaries. We apply that framework to nonstate regulation of labor conditions, where the primary intended beneficiaries are workers and their families, especially in poorer countries. We first outline the different ways in which beneficiaries can relate to regulators, intermediaries, and targets; we then develop conjectures about the effect of different relationships on regulatory impacts and democratic legitimacy in relation to corporate power structures, specifically those embedded in the governance of global supply chains. We illustrate these conjectures primarily with examples from three initiatives—Rugmark, the Fair Labor Association, and the Fairtrade system. We conclude that it matters whether and how beneficiaries are included in the regulatory process.

Public accountability within transnational supply chains: a global agenda for empowering Southern workers?

In recent years, one of the central claims promoted by critics of “globalization” has been that the existing system of global economic governance is being undermined by the emergence of “accountability deficits.” According to this widespread view, the expanding power of multinational companies to influence the lives of workers in the global South, in the absence of adequate accountability mechanisms, is leading to increasing exploitation of Southern workers. Partly in response to such perceptions, a range of non-state actors have begun to explore new strategies that attempt to hold companies within transnational supply chains directly accountable for their impact on the lives of workers. In this context, both the seriousness of existing accountability deficits, and the effectiveness of non-state initiatives designed to confront them, remain the subject of widespread debate. This chapter presents an analysis of these debates with reference to a case study of workers in Nicaraguan garment factories, and the production chains that connect them into the global structures of the garment industry. It maps current changes to institutions of governance and accountability within the garment industry, and evaluates the impact of these changes upon the “empowerment” of Southern garment workers. The garment industry offers an ideal case for exploring transformations of public accountability within transnational economic structures, since it is both extensively globalized and highly politicized.

Rethinking Global Market Governance Crisis and Reinvention

The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been compared to other historical moments during which significant shifts in regimes of market governance have occurred. Here, we engage with the pieces that follow in this special section of Politics & Society as we consider three dimensions along which global market governance might be transformed in the direction of greater democracy. First, given that problems of market governance often extend across national boundaries, enhanced intergovernmental coordination could play a key role in promoting the public interest. Second, broader country representation would help to ensure that the interests of different national publics are more fully addressed. Third, wider social participation would expand the definition of the public interest at both the national and global levels, allowing a range of social groups to enhance the quality of their representation by governments and IGOs, and to engage more directly in the project of market governance.

Restricted entitlements for skilled temporary migrants: the limits of migrant consent

ABSTRACT Temporary labour migration programmes have often attracted significant controversy, particularly with regard to provisions that restrict the social entitlements available to temporary migrant workers, compared with other categories of residents. Advocates of such restrictions have argued that migrants freely choose to participate in temporary migration schemes on the prevailing terms, and are free to leave at any time if such participation no longer serves their interests. Our central goal in this paper is to critically evaluate such consent-based justifications for restricted social entitlements of temporary migrant workers, with reference to empirical evidence concerning the practical social and economic conditions of choice experienced by these temporary migrants. Drawing on evidence from one major receiving country – Australia – we show that consent-based justifications for restricted social entitlements fail to fully account for either the practical complexity of individual migration choices, or the de facto operation of Australia’s skilled temporary migration programme as a ‘test run’ for potential future permanent residents or citizens. By bringing sociological analysis of lived migrant experiences into critical engagement with normative debates about restricted social entitlements, we contribute to the bridging of empirical and normative migration debates, which too often evolve in parallel.

The Meaning and Purposes of Transnational Accountability

It is now commonplace for the language of accountability to be invoked in debates about transnational power and governance. Yet there is little agreement on whether ‘accountability’ takes an analogous form between national and transnational governance domains, and thus whether transnational extension of the concept overstretches the term – blurring or distorting our analysis of meanings and purposes of accountability. This paper suggests that although the same core meaning of accountability is equally relevant at transnational as at national scale, there are some notable differences in how questions about accountability ‘for what’, ‘to whom’ and ‘through what means’ are answered in a transnational governance setting. Nonetheless, analysing transnational accountability can enhance our understanding of important but often overlooked purposes of accountability – focusing our attention on accountability not only as a means of legitimizing and stabilizing public governance processes, but also as a vehicle for political contestation and institutional change.

Demanding Rights in Company-Community Resource Extraction Conflicts: Examining the Cases of Vedanta and POSCO in Odisha, India

Amidst intensified competition for land available to private investors in mining, industrial and commercial agriculture sectors, contests between transnational companies and communities over land are emerging in many countries as a significant domain of social conflict. This chapter examines the cases of two company-community conflicts over land in the Indian State of Odisha, in which communities and their supporters have mobilized to resist proposed new projects, drawing in various ways on rights-based discourses to articulate and support their claims. One conflict relates to the acquisition of land for a bauxite mining project involving the Indian-based and UK-listed company Vedanta, while the other concerns the construction of a mega steel complex by the South Korean company POSCO. We compare the strategies of mobilization and claim-making followed by communities in the two cases, asking why there have been different outcomes in these two conflicts despite striking similarities between them. We argue that the different dynamics and outcomes in the two cases have resulted from (sometimes subtle) differences between the cases with respect to in a combination of three factors: (a) the strength of local solidarity and organizational capacity, (b) the capacity of campaigners to recruit national political and civil society elites in support of community claims, and (c) the extent to which grassroots claims have been supported by transnational mobilization. Taken together, these three factors highlight the central importance of interactions between grassroots mobilization and the political actions of national and international ‘elites’ in shaping outcomes of company-community conflicts.

Should the international accounting standards board have responsibility for human rights

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to explore the basis for, and ramifications of, applying relevant human rights norms – such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights – to the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). In doing so, the paper seeks to contribute to scholarship on the political legitimisation of the IASB’s structure and activities under prevailing global governance conditions. Design/methodology/approach - – The paper explores three distinct argumentative logics regarding responsibilities for justice and human rights Findings - – The three distinct argumentative logic rest on differing assumptions – the goal is not to reconcile or synthesise these approaches, but to propose that these approaches offer alternative and in some ways complementary insights, each of which contributes to answering questions about how human rights obligations of the IASB should be defined, and how such a responsibility could be “actually proceduralised”. Originality/value - – The analysis provides an important starting point for beginning to think about how responsibilities for human rights might be applied to the operation of the IASB.

The liberal battlefields of global business regulation

The global justice movement has often been associated with opposition to the broad programme of ‘neoliberalism’ and associated patterns of ‘corporate globalisation’, creating a widespread impression that this movement is opposed to liberalism more broadly conceived. Our goal in this article is to challenge this widespread view. By engaging in critical interpretive analysis of the contemporary ‘corporate accountability’ movement, we argue that the corporate accountability agenda is not opposed to the core values of a liberal project. Rather, it is seeking to reconfigure the design of liberal institutions of individual rights-protection, adjusting these for new material conditions associated with economic globalisation, under which powerful corporations alongside states now pose direct and significant threats to individual rights. This activist agenda is, therefore, much less radical in its challenge to the prevailing liberal global order than it may initially appear, since it functions to buttress rather than corrode many core normative commitments underpinning the liberal political project.

Social justice beyond bounded societies: Unravelling statism within global supply chains?

There is a rising sense within contemporary global politics that the advance of those processes of global interconnectedness that we bluntly refer to as globalisation brings with it increasing problems of injustice on a global scale, in the form of entrenched poverty, social exclusion and the abuse of power. For some observers, the capacity of populations in rich countries to help remedy such social ills at reasonable cost provides sufficient reason to underpin social justice obligations at a global level, extended to all on the basis of their shared humanity. For others, the problem is not simply the existence of global poverty and exclusion. Rather, concern focuses on intensified patterns of economic interdependence and dramatically expanded capabilities for transnational communication and social interaction, which are seen as contributing to global problems of poverty, exclusion and abuse of power in which populations in the rich world are directly implicated.