Governance in a Multipolar World: Transparency and Good Governance of Transnational Commercial Relationships

The governance of transnational commercial relationships is inherently multi-layered and multipolar. These relationships are legitimately regulated by a plurality of national, international, and transnational public and private actors. The increasing global dimension and economic power of private corporations makes it increasingly difficult for public actors to regulate them through mandatory rules. In this multipolar world there are often asymmetrical relationships between states, corporations, international institutions, NGOs, and individuals. These asymmetries can have adverse effects on weaker parties or those not part of the relationship, such as workers, consumers, and the natural environment. In order to eliminate or mitigate these adverse effects, good governance is necessary in the context of transnational commercial relationships. The central challenge in achieving good governance is to strike the optimal balance between the different interests of all governance actors and to empower the underrepresented interests of, among others, workers, consumers, and the natural environment. Most conceptions of good governance currently proposed by scholars and policy-makers compile different principles of good governance that often contradict each other. The implementation of and adherence to these principles is often opaque. This questions the successful achievement of the good governance goal. This paper will argue that transparency is a necessary component of good governance in the transnational economic context. It will do so by introducing a novel procedural framework of good governance towards social sustainability. Rather than prescribing a set of good governance rules, the proposed framework will focus on the manner in which conflicting interests and policies are balanced and traded off. This balancing of interests and trade-offs must be transparent. Transparency, it will be argued, is essential to empower civil society actors, such as NGOs, consumers, and individual citizens, and enable them to make more autonomous informed choices in the governance process. This procedural conception of good governance will enable to integrate all affected actors and interests into the governance process. This paper will conclude that this procedural conception of good governance can contribute to solving problems of accountability, legitimacy, and enforceability associated with the opaqueness and complexity of governance.