Community structure and the behavior of transnational sustainability governors: Toward a multi‐relational approach

Abstract

Hundreds of transnational private governance organizations (TPGOs) have emerged in recent decades to govern social and environmental conditions of production using voluntary standards. A debate persists over whether the ties among different TPGOs and other organizations create a professional community that affects the behavior of TPGOs. To help resolve this debate, we analyze multiple ties among agriculture TPGOs to offer a more robust exploration of community structures and their potential effects for three forms of TPGO behavior – coordination, collaboration, and isomorphism. Our aggregate measure of ties reveals a thin community dominated by older TPGOs and TPGOs advancing a broad notion of sustainability that were created by Solidaridad, the World Wildlife Fund, and/or Unilever. The clearest community structures are built from ties that exhibit the potential for not actual collaboration, coordination, and isomorphism. Thus, while there exists convergence toward an emergent TPGO‐community, obstacles remain to more intense behavioral effects for TPGOs.

Varieties of multi-stakeholder governance: selecting legitimation strategies in transnational sustainability politics

“…A longstanding debate in the literature on transnational private governance revolves around the question of whether MSIs converge towards a common model of 'good private governance' or whether diversity persists (and if so to what degree). Much of this debate has centred on fieldlevel dynamicsin particular, the nature and strength of isomorphic processes, and how they have evolved over time (Dingwerth, 2017;Dingwerth & Pattberg, 2009;Fransen, Schalk, & Auld, 2018;Loconto & Fouilleux, 2014). In a recent article, Dingwerth (2017) argued that, as transnational private governance has become a pervasive phenomenon, democratic legitimation pressures have decreased.…”

Transnational Governance for Mining and the Mineral Lifecycle

“…A third form investigates the interaction among initiatives and between initiatives and states, as well as the implications for how initiatives work and evolve, norm development, and problem solving; these studies use structural theories (e.g., organizational ecology), agent-centric theories, and combinations of both (36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42). Research on orchestration assumes that the benefits of decentralized transnational governance can only be realized if certain actors, such as international organizations, work to nurture coherence (43).…”

Governance through global networks and corporate signaling

“…; Green , ; Abbott et al . ; Fransen et al ., ) . First, we conceptualize the authority of CSR schemes, that is, their capacity to exert normative force, as an emergent, network‐based property , dependent on certain structural features of the network.…”

“…Another novelty of our empirical strategy is that it reaches past a mere topological analysis by seeking to examine the regulatory impact of the network as a whole (Bartley & Smith ; Green ; Fransen et al . ).…”

“…We applied the snowball strategy based on a single iteration (we did not look for new connections potentially produced by the additional 12 codes).24 This analysis does not expose all of the interactions between schemes. One can go deeper by analyzing major global conferences in which representatives from these organizations meet, personal relations between directors or employees and more(Fransen et al 2018).…”