The Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety is a transnational governance approach towards implementing factory safety standards in the Bangladeshi garment sector. Some commentators argue that the Accord is a 'game changer' in times of corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially because it includes transnational buying companies in a legally binding contract with union federations. This article takes the Accord as an interesting case for how labour networks become part of a transnational governance arrangement. Taking a cultural political economy perspective, the author assumes that the Accord marks a practice of implementing ethical demands under conditions of supply chain capitalism and argues that calling the Accord a paradigm shift would be overly optimistic: while labour networks were able to use a crisis in the regime of CSR policies, they could not challenge the managerial culture of translating political demands according to the conventions of supply chain management. These conventions separate the sources of profit from the political claim for decent labour standards. In a transnational governance initiative, labour networks rely on such management conventions, since they are constitutive of the production network. From this perspective the Accord is an impressive reaction to the Rana Plaza disaster, but not a game changer.
With the aim of grounding the analysis of private transnational human rights governance, the article examines how a European reinsurance company links its human rights policy to its core business of underwriting risks in the case of Belo Monte, a large hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on the current international regulatory framework, the global political economy of reinsurance is becoming a constitutive element of human rights governance. Conceptualising underwriting as a social practice, we observe how human rights norms are translated into the corporate form of risks. This process goes beyond questions of norm compliance and involves practices of valuation and boundary-drawing based on the underwriter's competences and background knowledge about reinsurance markets, value chains and corporate hierarchies. We conclude with a critique of private governance as an institutional pillar of the human rights system that rests on business rationales rather than lending institutional power to rights-holders.
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