Corporate codes of conduct, product certifications, process standards, and other voluntary, non-governmental forms of private governance have proliferated in the last two decades. These innovations are a response to social pressures unleashed by globalization and the inadequacy of governmental institutions for addressing its social and environmental impacts. Private governance has had some notable successes, but there are clear limits to what it alone can be expected to accomplish. We hypothesize that the effectiveness of private governance depends on four main factors: 1) the structure of the particular global value chain in which production takes place; 2) the extent to which demand for a firm's products relies on its brand identity; 3) the possibilities for collective action by consumers, workers, or other activists to exert pressure on producers; and 4) the extent to which commercial interests of lead firms align with social and environmental concerns. Taken together, these hypotheses suggest that private governance will flourish in only a limited set of circumstances. With the trend towards consolidation of production in the largest developing countries, however, we also see a strengthening of some forms of public governance. Private governance will not disappear, but it will be linked to emerging forms of multi-stakeholder institutions.

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Abstract. Introducing this Special Feature of the International Labour Review on “Decent work in global production networks” (GPNs), this article reviews the research challenges posed by GPNs, which are changing the structure of trade, production and employment in today's globalized economy. The authors define the concepts of social and economic upgrading/downgrading that are used in the following contributions to investigate the effects of GPNs. They conclude with a discussion of the initiatives that governments and non‐state actors have taken to address the “global governance deficit” and consequent decent work deficits that have emerged with the expansion of GPNs.

Understanding public distrust of science is both theoretically and practically important. While previous research has focused on the association between political ideology and trust in science, it is at best an inconsistent predictor. This study demonstrates that two dimensions of political ideology—attitudes towards governments and corporations—can more precisely predict trust in science across issues. Using a survey in the United States and Germany on the science of climate change and genetically modified foods, we find that an individual’s trust in science varies across issues and that attitudes towards government and corporations are important predictors of this trust.

When nations negotiate, often the toughest bargaining is not between nations but within them. The reason is simple: proposed international agreements, no matter how much in the “national interest,” inevitably have differential effects on factional concerns, threatening to make winners of some and losers of others. Potential losers often have the power to prevent agreements not to their liking, thereby limiting what is possible in international negotiations. This article uses a negotiation analytic framework to analyze the consequences of such limits. It argues that limits need not be a liability for a divided country—under some circumstances they may provide a bargaining advantage—and demonstrates circumstances under which intracountry differences are desirable and undesirable from a national perspective. More specifically, the article shows that the effect of domestic differences on international negotiations depends on the configuration of domestic interests, on the nature of domestic political processes, and on characteristics of the international bargain. It then explores a particular dimension of the domestic process: the ability to link issues which allow factions to make internal side-payments. It demonstrates that internal issue linkage can have profound effects on the external bargain and explores the strategic implications of side-payments for those who would manage domestic differences in international negotiations.