Private authority and public policy interactions in global context: Governance spheres for problem solving

Private organizations play a growing role in governing global issues alongside traditional public actors such as states, international organizations, and subnational governments. What do we know about how private authority and public policy interact? What are the implications of answering this question for understanding support for, and effects of, policy development generally? The purpose of this article is to reflect on these questions by introducing, and reviewing, a special issue that challenges explicit claims, and implicit methodologies, that treat private and public governance realms as distinct and/or static. We do so by advancing a theoretical and conceptual framework with which to explore how the contributions to this special issue enhance an understanding about governance interactions across a range of empirical, sectoral, and regional domains. We specifically introduce the concept of governance spheres to capture the proliferation of issue domains denoted by highly fluid interactions across public and private governance boundaries.     

Designing policy for the long term: agency,policy feedback and policy change

Policy Sciences - Policy feedback research faces a potential pivot point owing to recent theoretical and substantive advances. Concerted attention now spans new scientific communities, such as...     

Can Non-state Governance 'Ratchet Up' Global Environmental Standards? Lessons from the Forest Sector

The failure of the worlds' governments to agree on a binding global forest convention at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit led many leading environmental groups to advance eco-labelling 'forest certification' programmes that, they hoped, would achieve greater success in implementing sustainable forest management. Eschewing traditional State-centered authority, supporters of this 'non-State market driven' (NSMD) approach turn to customers of wood products to create compliance mechanisms, either through positive incentives such as market access or price premiums, or negative incentives such as 'direct targeting' or 'boycott' campaigns. Understanding how such systems might 'ratchet up' global forestry standards, we argue, requires that existing scholarship place greater attention on the role of public policies in helping to facilitate the impacts of private solutions. Specifically, we argue that scholars and practitioners need to assess strategic decisions not only on the basis of their appropriateness at present, but what they might do to trigger a global 'race to the top' at a later time.     

Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change

Most policy-relevant work on climate change in the social sciences either analyzes costs and benefits of particular policy options against important but often narrow sets of objectives or attempts to explain past successes or failures. We argue that an ??applied forward reasoning?? approach is better suited for social scientists seeking to address climate change, which we characterize as a ??super wicked?? problem comprising four key features: time is running out; those who cause the problem also seek to provide a solution; the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent; and, partly as a result, policy responses discount the future irrationally. These four features combine to create a policy-making ??tragedy?? where traditional analytical techniques are ill equipped to identify solutions, even when it is well recognized that actions must take place soon to avoid catastrophic future impacts. To overcome this tragedy, greater attention must be given to the generation of path-dependent policy interventions that can ??constrain our future collective selves.?? Three diagnostic questions result that orient policy analysis toward understanding how to trigger sticky interventions that, through progressive incremental trajectories, entrench support over time while expanding the populations they cover. Drawing especially from the literature on path dependency, but inverting it to develop policy responses going forward, we illustrate the plausibility of our framework for identifying new areas of research and new ways to think about policy interventions to address super wicked problems.     

Legitimacy and the Privatization of Environmental Governance: How Non–State Market–Driven (NSMD) Governance Systems Gain Rule–Making Authority

In recent years, transnational and domestic nongovernmental organizations have created non–state market–driven (NSMD) governance systems whose purpose is to develop and implement environmentally and socially responsible management practices. Eschewing traditional state authority, these systems and their supporters have turned to the market's supply chain to create incentives and force companies to comply.
This paper develops an analytical framework designed to understand better the emergence of NSMD governance systems and the conditions under which they may gain authority to create policy. Its theoretical roots draw on pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy granting distinctions made within organizational sociology, while its empirical focus is on the case of sustainable forestry certification, arguably the most advanced case of NSMD governance globally. The paper argues that such a framework is needed to assess whether these new private governance systems might ultimately challenge existing state–centered authority and public policy–making processes, and in so doing reshape power relations within domestic and global environmental governance.     

Private regulation,public policy,and the perils of adverse ontological selection

What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo-Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance's problem-solving potential and its interactions with public policy.     

Punctuating Which Equilibrium? Understanding Thermostatic Policy Dynamics in Pacific Northwest Forestry

A key theme among seminal contributions to policy studies, including Baumgartner and Jones (1993; 2002) , Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) , and Hall (1989; 1993) , is that "external perturbations" outside of the policy subsystem, characterized by some type of societal upheaval, are critical for explaining the development of profound and durable policy changes which are otherwise prevented by institutional stability. We argue that these assumptions, while useful for assessing many cases of policy change, do not adequately capture historical patterns of forest policy development in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Differences in policy development concerning state and federal regulation of private and public forest lands governing the same problem, region, and population challenge much of the prevailing orthodoxy on policy dynamics. To address this puzzle, we revisit and expand existing taxonomies identifying the levels and processes of change that policies undergo. This exercise reveals the existence of a "thermostatic" institutional setting governing policy development on federal lands that was absent in the institutions governing private lands. This thermostatic institutional arrangement contained durable policy objectives that required policy settings to undergo major change in order to maintain the institution's defining characteristics. Policy scientists need to distinguish such "hard institutions" that necessitate paradigmatic changes in policy settings from those that do not permit them.     

Can non‐state global governance be legitimate? An analytical framework

In the absence of effective national and intergovernmental regulation to ameliorate global environmental and social problems, “private” alternatives have proliferated, including self‐regulation, corporate social responsibility, and public–private partnerships. Of the alternatives, “non‐state market driven” (NSMD) governance systems deserve greater attention because they offer the strongest regulation and potential to socially embed global markets. NSMD systems encourage compliance by recognizing and tracking, along the market’s supply chain, responsibly produced goods and services. They aim to establish “political legitimacy” whereby firms, social actors, and stakeholders are united into a community that accepts “shared rule as appropriate and justified.” Drawing inductively on evidence from a range of NSMD systems, and deductively on theories of institutions and learning, we develop an analytical framework and a preliminary set of causal propositions to explicate whether and how political legitimacy might be achieved. The framework corrects the existing literature’s inattention to the conditioning effects of global social structure, and its tendency to treat actor evaluations of NSMD systems as static and strategic. It identifies a three‐phase process through which NSMD systems might gain political legitimacy. It posits that a “logic of consequences” alone cannot explain actor evaluations: the explanation requires greater reference to a “logic of appropriateness” as systems progress through the phases. The framework aims to guide future empirical work to assess the potential of NSMD systems to socially embed global markets.