A Seat at the Table: the Role of the Global South in Private Environmental Governance

Political scientists have expressed a growing interest in understanding the emergence of rule-making authority by non-state actors. Corporations, for instance, are reinventing themselves as political players in an increasing number of self-regulatory arrangements. This recent but fast-growing phenomenon has been particularly evident in international environmental regimes. The need for multilevel and multi-stakeholder responses to challenges such as climate change alongside political setbacks in the multilateral state-led negotiations have steered innovative systems of private governance. This emerging research agenda, however, suffers from a geographical bias. It emphasizes the role of private actors in the Global North as norm-entrepreneurs. There is a lack of understanding of how and to which extent non-state actors from the Global South participate in private norms creation and development, and the consequences if they fail to join in. This question matters since norm-entrepreneurship in general and standard-setting in particular do not configure politically neutral activities, even when undergone by private actors. Non-participation has consequences for the acceptance and effectiveness of such arrangements in that the expected implementing actors not always have their needs and interests incorporated in the emerging rules. Who wins and loses is highly dependent upon who writes and who is able to influence private rule-making. This research assesses the influence of countries’ economic diversity and complexity on the ability of private actors from the Global South to set the new rules of the game. Since private governance turns to market transactions rather to state-sovereignty as the source of authority, global supply chains (GSCs) offer the institutional settings where political struggles happen. Decisions are mostly made further down the GSC, regulating activities in the upstream levels. Therefore, private actors from commodity-dependent countries are at a disadvantage compared to actors in industrialized countries. When the Global South fails to integrate into the global economy, chances are that they remain rule-takers not only in public but also in private arrangements, thus feeding a vicious cycle of marginalization. Opening the black box of selected non-state market driven (NSMD) governance systems, particularly post-2000 commodity roundtables will serve to test the economic diversity and complexity argument related to Southern participation. By bringing GSCs and the developed-developing countries dichotomy to the analysis, this study aims to shed new light on the challenges of inclusiveness and distributional justice in private environmental governance.