This book is a comparative study about the evolution of transnational sustainability governance in two South American nations, Brazil and Argentina, as well as a broader examination of private regulatory and diffusion processes from the perspective of domestic political environments in the global South. As such, the book is framed against the broader question of global governance, its evolution, and its possibilities; a major theme in political and international scholarship since the end of the Cold War, as states, international organizations and civil society actors explored new forms of ‘doing internationally what governments do at home’ (Finkelstein 1995, p. 369). Nowadays, global governance comprises new forms of regulation and modes of acting involving a variety of institutions, actors, and norms, constituting what Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye Jr. (2002, p. 208) referred as the ‘governance of globalism’, the general patterning of transborder transactions. Over the last three decades, this patterning has come to include, among numerous international arrangements and regimes, an evolving array of private and semi-private initiatives aiming to endow globalization with a more stable and broader regulatory horizon, capable of complementing, extending, or substituting formal state-based mechanisms and rules (Hall and Biersteker 2002; Strange 1996). The proliferation of this type of governance has been such that by the 2000s scholars have come to accept their impact over the manner international regulation is conducted, blurring conventional distinctions between ‘voluntary and mandatory regulations, state and non-state regulations, private and public law, and hard and soft law’ (Vogel 2008, p. 265).
This is particularly the case regarding sustainability governance—the array of voluntary initiatives, standards, and frameworks addressing the social and environmental externalities of the operation of global firms and markets, from production to consumption (Ponte and Cheyn s 2013). For scholars such as Klaus Dingwerth and Philipp Pattberg (2009, p. 708), this area of transnational governance currently constitutes an independent ‘organizational field’, while Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal (2008, p. 509) recognize that private regulation has developed its own standard model—with common organizational features, norm-setting mechanisms, objectives, and rhetoric—aimed at ‘negotiating standards with firms, encouraging and supervising self-regulation, or sponsoring voluntary management systems’. The relevance of sustainability norms for contemporary global economic governance is so that the International Trade Centre—the special joint agency of the UN and the WTO with the mission of expanding trade opportunities—recently included among its trade statistics, tariffs requirements, and Foreign Direct Investment tools, a map of over 150 voluntary standards, codes of conduct, and audit protocols for regulating and standardizing international markets (ITC 2015). 1
However, despite this sort of academic and institutional recognition, the study of transnational sustainability governance is crossed by a somewhat paradoxical orientation. On the one side, observers and scholars concentrate their efforts in studying events, developments, and actors located in a taken-for-granted ‘global’ level, where actors from developed countries and the global North are the main protagonists, rendering the domestic level as secondary if not irrelevant. At the same time, sustainability governance is considered to be of special importance to enhance regulation and practices in environments where norms and regulatory capacities are found lacking, as it is generally the case in developing economies. This means that the study of this area of transnational governance concentrates on issues at the origin, but not so much at the destination. It is clear that this ‘Northern’ perspectivism is not entirely unjustified: after all, higher social, economic, organizational, and political standards are more reflective of conditions in economically advanced democracies in North America and Europe, and not so much of those characterizing regimes in Africa, Latin America, or South East Asia. Similarly, the North hosts the more influential, committed, and resourceful actors to make transnational regulation work, with the will and capacity to promote regulatory projects across national borders: citizens from the North populate international organizations, the high management of transnational corporations (TNCs), and occupy directive positions in international civil society entities and private standard-setting bodies. On the other hand, the global South—that awkward term that now covers from Bangladesh and Kenya to Russia and Mexico—refers to contexts where child labor can be used to manufacture garments, where young women and men may work in degrading sweatshop conditions, where foreign and local companies pollute the environment and exploit workers, where low-cost contractors and unsophisticated customers are based, where corruption is rife, and where state regulatory capacities are limited (when not complicit). Hence, as succinctly concluded by John Braithwaite (2006, p. 896), ‘developing economies are more lacking in all the capacities necessary to make responsive regulation work well than are wealthy societies’. Logically then, the common view on the matter is that transnational private governance should flow ‘downward’, from North to South, and the developmental and regulatory puzzle facing scholars andregulators is to devise ways in which private schemes can serve to raise the normative bar and improve regulatory effectiveness in these latter locations, incentivizing Southern actors to comply with, adopt, or embrace higherstandards and ‘better’ practices.
Furthermore, the main theoretical models used to explain global and private governance processes help sustain this perspectivism. Thus, a clearly delineated hierarchical relation between North and South is generally assumed by International Relations realist arguments, on the basis that ‘great power governments remain the most important actors in establishing and enforcing the rules of the global economy’ (Drezner 2007, p. xii). It is equally present in institutional arguments such as Vogel’s (2008) ‘California Effect’, where producers in developing countries seeking to export to developed markets are incentivized to raise their standards to meet the requirements of consumers and regulators in the global North. Similarly, constructivist explanations, granting greater weight to ideational factors, largely accept that the legitimacy of private regulation is enhanced when norms and rules ‘at the local level’ conform to ‘institutionalized global marketplace norms as well as emerging democratic, social, and environmental norms in the global public domain’ (Bernstein and Cashore 2007, p. 352)—and where this ‘global public domain’ clearly implies conditions and behaviors in the image of advanced economies and Western polities. In this manner, both rationalists’ arguments, emphasizing incentives and a logic of consequences, as well as constructivists’ ones pointing to legitimacy and a logic of correspondence (March and Olsen 1998) present convincing logics to justify the sidelining of contextual particularities in the South, the expected receiver of private regulation. As a consequence, political and social conditions in developing economies are assumed silent and passive, or treated as barriers and deficits to be overcome and ultimately upgraded by transnational governance. The South then is context, agency lays somewhere else, and the winds behind transnational regulation and governance blow from North America and Western Europe.
My view however, and that of others, is that by maintaining this global/Northern perspectivism, the literature simplifies and overlooks important developments and factors on the ‘receiving side’ of transnational governance, in the process decoupling the diffusion and uptake of global norms from the political, cultural, and historical conditions at play in their expected contexts of application. In the words of Tim Bartley, this has favored the ‘black boxing’ of private regulation (Bartley 2010, p. 26), and a tacit but ubiquitous premise that regulatory frameworks can always be readily exported to different locations. This, I claim, has resulted in the consolidation of a one-sided narrative, a narrative of great power states, international organizations, large TNCs, and Northern-based civil society actors, and of models, values, and standards built in the cosmopolitan ideal of contemporary liberal capitalist democracies. Hence, this book concerns with this situation, setting to expand existing conceptions of the manner in which national structures in emerging economies can ‘frustrate, amplify, or reconfigure transnational business governance’ (Bartley 2014, p. 95).
The book does so by providing a detailed examination of the domestic trajectory of transnational sustainability governance in two South American countries, Argentina and Brazil, and analyzing the local circumstances that affect different outcomes—in terms of participation, interest, and visibility—regarding the diffusion and uptake of private regulation in settings (in principle) exposed to similar ‘global’ forces and influences. The book indicates that Brazilian engagement with the global sustainability agenda appears to be active and highly institutionalized, while in Argentina the opposite is the case, with a poor and fragmented involvement in private regulation. While conventional explanations wouldexplain these divergences by pointing to ‘the diffusion dynamics of international trade, investment, and penetration by foreign firms and advocacy groups’ (Espach 2009, p. 6), I will argue that these reasons are insufficient to justify thepattern of engagement observed in these two countries: after all, Brazil and Argentina have rather similar trade profiles and levels of industrial and socio-economic development, and over the last two decades they have experienced similar political economic transitions, including a synchronic shift toward leftist government in the early 2000s. Moreover, Argentina, the country with the more limited participation pattern in sustainability governance, is actually the economy with greater presence of large foreign firms and with an economy with greater dependence on exports, while in Brazil engagement with private governance appears to have accentuated during the 2000s, under the gaze of a more protectionist left-wing administration. 2
My argument sets to question the extent to which patterns of national engagement with private regulatory regimes are indeed ‘pulled’ by transnational actors and forces, posing instead that domestic participation and interests are ‘pushed’ by underlying national political and cultural circumstances. Hence, contrary to mainstream marked-based models and transnational explanations, I argue that (i) domestic political and ideational structures, including models of state-society relations, political legacies and discourses, institutional configurations, and governmental programs, shape the disposition of local actors in relation to transnational sustainability initiatives, and that in doing so, (ii) impact over the organizational capacity and conditions of uptake configuring the effectiveness of a private regime at the domestic level.
By tackling the domestic dimension of transnational governance, the book offers two major contributions to the existing scholarly knowledge. First, it extends existing conceptual models of transnational regulation and norm diffusion through a framework that incorporates national political and cultural components. In general terms, my argument aligns with the work of scholars posing that a ‘turn to politics’ can better account for major qualitative differences in the uptake and effectiveness of private regimes at the national level, pointing to demand-side features of national industrial policy, models of state-business relations, and the political economy of specific industries (Bartley 2010; Ponte 2008; Ebeling and Yasué 2009; Dubash and Morgan 2012; Espach 2006). In more specific terms, the book argues that in the case of sustainability governance—often dealing with regulatory spheres and concerns of public relevance, from environment protection to labor and human rights—it is necessary to go beyond the institutionalized domain around a given industry or regulatory field, and engage with the various semi- and non-institutionalized dimensions at play in domestic politics, including cultural-political...