No abstract

In the absence of effective national and intergovernmental regulation to ameliorate global environmental and social problems, ''private'' alternatives have proliferated, including selfregulation, 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.

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 policymaking processes, and in so doing reshape power relations within domestic and global environmental governance.In the last decade, two related developments have confronted traditional domestic and international policy-making processes: the increasing use of procedures in which state policy-making authority is shared with (or given to) business, environmental, and other organized interests (Clapp; Coleman and Perl); and the increasing use of market-oriented policy instruments with which to address matters of concern to global civil society (Bernstein 2001a;Howlett 1999). Partly as a result, political scientists have been turning increasing attention to the apparent "privatization" of governance (Cutler, Haufler, and Porter 1999b;Haufler), while other social scientists, in a related vein, have examined the role of marketoriented consumerism in forcing policy change (Micheletti). 1

No abstract

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.