The Politics of Meta-Governance in Transnational Private Sustainability Governance
Policy Sciences, Volume 48, No. 2, June 2015; DOI 10.1007/s11077-015-9219-8
27 Pages Posted: 16 Jun 2015
Date Written: June 15, 2015
Abstract
In order to address challenges resulting from interactions between transnational private sustainability standard organizations, initiatives emerge that meta-govern these standards. Contrary to prevailing understandings in public policy literature, such meta-governance initiatives are mostly run by nongovernmental rather than governmental actors. While literature presents the sustainability standards field as predominantly governed by one meta-governor, ISEAL, it is hardly recognized that, alongside ISEAL, rival metagovernance initiatives are proliferating. These initiatives occur in similar sectors and issue fields, use quite similar modes of meta-governance and interact with each other. This paper explains the multiple emergence of meta-governance in the governance of sustainability standards in agriculture. It shows how meta-governance efforts are developed by political coalitions of nongovernmental actors with divergent views on and priorities in making production more sustainable. It therefore reveals the mechanism through which meta-governance of coordination problems among cross-border self-organizing governance arrangements may end up reproducing these coordination problems, rather than addressing them.
Keywords: Private standards, Meta-governance, Sustainability, Governance, Regulation, Competition, Coordination
JEL Classification: O13, O19, Q17
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation