Judgement without justice: on the efficacy of the European human rights regime

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is widely regarded as the most important human rights court worldwide. This article investigates the extent to which the court addresses cases from countries with the worst human rights performance. Using a new data set on all ECtHR judgments from 1995–2012, the analysis suggests that the ECtHR does not deliver its judgments against members of the Council of Europe with the worst human rights records, but instead against more democratic and affluent states. The reason is that litigating in front of a supranational court requires capacities that vulnerable people are unlikely to possess, except when aided by transnational advocacy groups. However, more judgements are issued against countries that lack independent judiciaries, where cases are less likely to be resolved at the domestic level. While the ECtHR might not address the worst human rights crimes, it plays a subsidiary role in the European human rights protection system by compensating for weak domestic judiciaries. However, the court's inability to independently pursue litigation, together with the lack of capacity in some countries to bring cases forward, have hampered more effective protection of human rights for the most vulnerable in Europe.     

Does local ownership bring about effectiveness? The case of a transnational advocacy network

In international development, shared ownership is assumed to be a condition for effectiveness. Academic studies question this relation, claiming shared ownership can instead lead to ineffectiveness. This study analysed the interplay between ownership and effectiveness in a transnational advocacy network for conflict prevention observed 2012–2015. Building on recent discussions about balancing unity and diversity in networks, this article unpacks the ownership/effectiveness relationship into three dimensions: collective identity, accountability processes and a shared advocacy message. We find that the question is not about more or less effectiveness, but about the processes shaping the meaning of effectiveness in particular institutional constellations.     

Norway as an Example in the UK Women’s Suffrage Campaign

This article analyses the character and meanings of references to Norwegian experiences in the UK women’s suffrage campaign. It argues that the references to Norway served two main purposes. Firstly, they served as evidence of all the good things that would happen as a result of women gaining the vote, such as wage equality and social reform. Secondly, they played a significant part in establishing a counter-narrative to the anti-suffragist warnings of all the terrible things that would follow women’s suffrage. The study also discusses the limitations of political exchange and shows how different political contexts came into play in the debates on the validity of the Norwegian example.     

后发展型跨国公司发展战略探析及我国的借鉴

以日本韩国等国家中的跨国公司为代表的后发展型跨国公司,在微观发展战略和宏观发展战略方面为中国发展提供了借鉴。中国跨国公司属于后发展型跨国公司,其发展需要政府的扶持,同时,在产业战略选择上应注重投资高技术行业和服务业;在投资战略选择上应注重以合资方式为主;在区域战略选择上注重直接投资应以发展中国家为重点,逐渐向发达国家发展。     

我国乡镇企业跨国经营的策略选择

跨国经营是企业在全球化的世界经济中求得生存和发展的必然选择。我国乡镇企业在整体水平上要走出国门,从事跨国经营虽然有诸多困难,但是,有规模较小、机制灵活、适应能力强的特点,使其完全可以利用自身优势,选择灵活多样的形式进行跨国经营。     

跨国银行监管体制研究

本文对当今世界各主要国家的跨国银行监管体制进行了比较 ,分析了不同类型的跨国银行监管体制的优缺点 ,对目前世界各国的跨国家银行监管体制的发展进行了评价。在此基础上 ,本文对中国的跨国银行监管体制的改革提出了建议。     

Experimentalist interactions: Joining up the transnational timber legality regime

This paper analyzes the interactions between the separate components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, both public and private. It examines how far, and through what institutional mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joined-up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The paper argues that the experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has fostered productive, mutually reinforcing interactions both with public timber legality regulation in other consumer countries and with private certification schemes. But this emerging regime remains highly polyarchic, with broad scope for autonomous initiatives by NGOs and private service providers, along with national governments, international organizations, and multi-donor partnerships. Hence horizontal integration and coordination within it depend on a series of institutional mechanisms, some of which are distinctively experimentalist, while others can also be found in more conventional regimes. These mechanisms include cross-referencing and reciprocal endorsement of rules and standards; recursive learning through information pooling and peer review of implementation experience; public oversight and joint assessment of private certification and legality verification schemes; and the “penalty default” effect of public legality regulation in consumer countries, which have pushed both exporting countries and transnational firms to comply with the norms and procedures of the emerging transnational regime. The paper's findings thus provide robust new evidence for the claim advanced in previous work that a joined-up transnational regime can be assembled piece by piece under polyarchic conditions through coordinated learning from decentralized experimentation, without a hegemonic power to impose common global rules.     

Grounding transnational business governance: A political-strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South

Recent scholarship on transnational business governance has begun to examine public-private interactions and the active role of governments. We make two key contributions that integrate and expand this literature. First, in juxtaposition to functionalist accounts, we foreground the fundamentally political and often contentious character of these interactions. As private transnational governance schemes and standards “hit the ground,” private-public interactions, we argue, are embedded in national political arenas and tied to domestic distributional struggles among competing regulatory coalitions. Building upon multiple empirical streams of research, we develop a political-strategic framework that maps the diversity of Southern government responses (substitute, adopt, repurpose, replace, or reject) to transnational private governance. Our framework shows that government responses are a function of both strategic fit with domestic industrial capabilities and structures, and strength of developmental state capacity. Second, our proposed framework adopts the vantage point of Global South governments and industries, particularly how development challenges and strategic options within global value chains affect their understanding of, and responses to, transnational schemes and standards. This is an important corrective to a Northern bias in the private governance literature.     

Toward “hardened” accountability? Analyzing the European Union's hybrid transnational governance in timber and biofuel supply chains

The voluntary/mandatory divide is a constant feature of scholarly debates on corporate accountability for sustainability in global supply chains. A widely held assumption is that the addition of state authority to private transnational governance in global supply chains will “harden” accountability and, thus, promote more sustainable production. The state's ability to set legally binding requirements is expected to coerce companies into complying. The hybridization of private and state authority is seen to strengthen good practice in private authority. This empirical study questions these assumptions based on an analysis of two hybrid governance arrangements for sustainability in global supply chains: the EU's Timber Regulation (EUTR) and Renewable Energy Directive (RED). The results demonstrate that both EUTR and EU-RED yield sector wide efforts of compliance and to this extent can be seen as enhancing accountability in the sense of answerability. At the same time, we find that the policies in both cases are not more demanding, nor enforced strictly, the latter putting into question their potential to coerce companies. Further, a “hardening” of accountability is at least obscured as both EUTR and EU-RED have stripped private authority they employ in their hybrid transnational governance from the need to establish legitimacy with a broader audience. This makes legal compliance and cost-effectiveness the core factor for companies’ efforts to demonstrate compliance. Our findings hence question whether the EUTR and EU-RED have led to “hardened” accountability compared to private transnational governance, and ask for an empirical, more nuanced understanding of what there is to gain or lose from hybridizing private and state authority in transnational governance.     

Can private governance boost public policy? Insights from public–private governance interactions in the fisheries and electricity sectors

Based on the inductive analysis of two parallel cases of private environmental governance – private, market-driven fisheries governance and private, market-driven governance for electricity decarbonization – this paper uncovers a trigger for positive public policy spillovers from private environmental governance. It identifies circumstances that prompt groups of business actors working as private regulators to also take on a role as public policy advocates and supporters, revealing a potential for private governance initiatives that are targeted at a particular environmental problem to serve as a bolster for the public regulatory governance of that problem as well. Both private governance cases at the basis of this analysis feature groups of business actors seeking to meet voluntary sustainability goals through the tools of private governance (specifically, through flexing buyer power and private authority in an effort to reform environmentally problematic practices among particular groups of suppliers). In both cases, the business's inability to attain private sustainability goals though private governance means alone has given rise to business demand for facilitative public environmental policy and regulation. The analysis presented in this paper thus points to the occurrence of a particular and intriguing pattern of complementarity between private authority and public policy – one where public policy is called on to fill gaps left by private environmental governance and authority. And it identifies key conditions for such private-governance-driven recentering of public policy to occur, namely the presence of private supply chain greening goals and commitments that are economically, reputationally, and/or competitively critical for businesses to attain, combined with shortfalls in the capacity of businesses' private authority to bring about such attainment. The two case analysis further suggests the importance of ENGOs in identifying and activating some of the opportunities for leveraging shortfalls in private environmental governance to the advantage of public environmental policy and regulation.