Accounts and Implications of Transnational Governance Interactions
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‘The challenge is who rules the world’: accounts and implications of transnational governance interactions Victoria Pagan Abstract Increased global interconnectivity has encouraged a prevalence of forums that seek to organise and facilitate action towards transnational governance. A body of work has examined such global forums and the theoretical contexts in which they operate but there is little which examines the dynamic interactions through these forums. This article explores the social, political and corporate struggles in the interactions through two global forums, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the World Social Forum (WSF). These forums are pathways through which corporate, political and social actors struggle to negotiate transnational governance as a mechanism for corporate responsibility. The article shows the lived experiences of those interacting to set goals and agendas for corporate responsibility and offers an analysis of how the agenda of transnational governance is negotiated, who is involved and the drivers and shapers of this interaction. Keywords: corporate responsibility; global forums; global governance; multi-stakeholder interactions; transnational governance; World Economic Forum; World Social Forum. Introduction Governance is “the explicit or implicit ‘rules of the game’ that enable and constrain domains of behaviour and the ability of particular actors to set and/or enforce them, either via formal authority relations or through other forms of power” (Bair and Palpacuer, 2015: S3) and these different corporate, political and social actors negotiate to both define and create governance of corporate responsibility transnationally (Beddewela and Fairbrass, 2015). Whilst ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ are sometimes used synonymously, this article follows the distinction offered by Eberlein et al. (2014: 3) that identifies the transnational as “systematic efforts to regulate business conduct that involve a significant degree of non-state authority in the performance of regulatory functions across national borders”, within broader legal and regulative systems operating at a global level. Governance issues have permeated analyses of international relations and affairs more or less explicitly in recent decades. It is integral to our understanding of social orderings, as Ruggie (2014: 5), explains: “governance, at whatever level of social organization it occurs, refers to the systems of authoritative norms, rules, institutions and practices by means of which any collectivity, from the local to the global, manages its common affairs.” Given this, Bair and Palpacuer (2015: 2) define different analytical levels of governance, including: corporate governance at the level of the organisation; industrial governance for recognition of the interconnections between different organisations within industries; and an emerging and contested form of global governance, defined as “the efforts of non-state actors to manage transnational processes, including via the creation of norms and rules regarding global production”. It is this recognition that, whilst governance can be conceptualised as systems for analysis in Ruggie’s (2014) terms, what is particularly important is to understand the exercise of power by actors in the creation and 1 legitimation of the norms and rules that have far reaching effects (Finnemore, 2014; Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson, 2006). The stakes of this are summarised in the quotation of the title of this article taken from a research participant: ‘the challenge is who rules the world’. Ways to critically question the ways in which the world is organised in terms of relationships and activities across state and nation boundaries are continually necessary as these evolve over time (Weiss and Wilkinson, 2014a). There are representatives of international business and other interests including politics and civil society who are positioned to act and influence across societies (Barnett and Sikkink, 2008). These people have been theorised as collectively symbolising, for example, a field of transnational relations (Garsten and Jacobsson, 2007)), or contributors to transnational governance (Hale and Held, 2011; Risse, 2012). There is a range of multi-stakeholder activity that seeks to govern action on issues of corporate responsibility on a transnational scale, with literature examining the way in which people and institutions seek to govern across geographic boundaries and with unboundaried effects (e.g. Rasche and Gilbert, 2012; Voegtlin and Pless, 2014; Rasche, 2012). Power is enacted through the people who operate at a global level by virtue of the corporate, political and/or social work they do (Zelli and Van Asselt, 2013). The existing literature tells us much about the enactment of governance initiatives (e.g. Rasche et al., 2013; Ruggie, 2014; Barkemeyer et al., 2015) and the place of governance within broader public and private international relations (e.g. Barnett and Sikkink, 2008; Risse, 2012; Weiss and Wilkinson, 2014b). What is worthy of further exploration is the answer to the question: how is the agenda of transnational governance negotiated in multi-stakeholder contexts? This article answers this by discussing processes of competition for legitimacy in practice (Fransen, 2012) through the accounts of individuals’ interactions in the setting of goals and agendas related to the transnational governance of corporate responsibility (Eberlein et al., 2014). Multi-stakeholder practices and initiatives are part of the transnational and global governance landscape, they are institutional spaces within the field with effects constructed by the actors within them. This paper explores interactions in two global forums as examples of social spaces for multi-stakeholder practice: the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the World Social Forum (WSF). Using these examples, it is argued that the contestation, debate and creation of transnational governance is enabled through such global forums. WEF, “committed to improving the state of the world, is the international organisation for public-private cooperation” (World Economic Forum, 2018) and WSF “is the largest gathering of civil society to find solutions to the problems of our time” (World Social Forum, 2016). The research on which this article is based includes a set of interviews undertaken with participants as they interact, engage in debate and create action for responsible practice across boundaries of geography and socio-economic power. The article is structured as follows. The following section introduces the context of transnational and global governance theories and the relationship with corporate responsibility. It argues the place of global forums as pathways to global governance and describes those who participate therein. The methodology for the research is then shown, followed by a presentation of the empirical material to support the argument, and conclusions in answer to the question posed previously. 2 CSR, transnational governance and multi-stakeholder activities It is shifts in international, transnational and/or global thinking that have promoted a subsequent shift in the locus of authority to include actors other than states, with authority derived from expertise as well as politics and other sources (Barnett and Sikkink, 2008). Governance of issues with significance for people, places and goods has therefore had to take account of remade institutions, geopolitics, and players whose interests may not always be in support of global prosperity (Bevir and Hall, 2011) but existing interdependently (Zürn, 2012). Corporations are no longer subject to governments in the way that they have been in the past and as such, governance is negotiated between those who have power at transnational levels, which is fragmented across states, businesses and civil society actors (Bair and Palpacuer, 2015; Finnemore, 2014). It is possible to see three themes in the transnational governance literature – explanations of rule emergence, selection and adoption (Roger and Dauvergne, 2016) – and underpinning these themes are revelations of a multiplicity of interactions and actors from public and private fields through which these rules are legitimated (Barkemeyer et al., 2015). Multi-stakeholder activities demonstrate characteristics of deliberative capacity, inclusiveness, authenticity and consequentiality, all to varying degrees/levels of quality (Schouten et al., 2012). Arguably, corporations are in a position of high power and responsibility (dominance) particularly in relation to governing their own standards of responsibility through their responses to regulation (Zürn, 2012) and/or voluntary adoption of reporting frameworks (Scherer and Palazzo, 2011). However, Ruggie (2014) identifies three systems affecting the ways in which corporations behave transnationally. These are: legal systems at national and international levels; voluntary systems of compliance and ‘good’ practice; and systems of corporate governance at the level of the organisation. This demonstrates both fixed and fluid elements and what is interesting is the intersection of these in producing two distinct, albeit interrelated, conceptualisations of governance in relation to corporate responsibility: firstly, the governance of corporate responsibility, for example, through various frameworks and agreements of the rules of behaviour (e.g. UN Global Compact); and secondly, corporate responsibility as transnational governance, that is, it is in itself an institution comprising subjectively