Why Do Private Governance Organizations Not Converge? A Political-Institutional Analysis of Transnational Labor Standards Regulation

Abstract

Voluntary governance arrangements focusing on responsible business behavior have proliferated over the past decades, and in many sectors of industry, different governance organizations now compete for business participation. This private governance competition has negative consequences for the effective functioning of these arrangements. In the literature up until now, optimism prevails on how a process of policy convergence between organizations may come about that would solve some of the problems that arise because of this competition. It is remarkable, however, that in one of the key industries referred to in this literature, the garments industry, convergence is virtually absent. This article explains why this is so and suggests that next to three existing approaches to the evolution and possible convergence of private governance organizations, actually a fourth, pessimistic type should be introduced, taking into account the evolution and perseverance of political difference between interest groups creating and supporting private governance arrangements.

Work ties beget community? Assessing interactions among transnational private governance organizations in sustainable agriculture

“…Competition among TPGOs may stimulate changes to standards or governance that are relevant for effective policymaking and the legitimate organization of governance (Overdevest 2010). It may also lead to coordination challenges and costs for TPGOs, their lead firm participants, suppliers to lead firms and societal stakeholders (Fransen 2011). TPGOs with different policy foci also interact.…”

“…Others hold that, despite generic patterns of TPGO policy convergence, substantial differences remain (Fransen 2011;Reinecke et al 2012).…”

“…First, competition between TPGOs that focus on similar issue areas and industries possibly affects their performance -the literature shows evidence of both beneficial and detrimental consequences (Fransen 2011;Overdevest 2010). Second, broader sustainability issues, such as land conversion and climate change, are covered by TPGOs that each focus on subsets of these issues.…”

Multiplication of Environmental Labelling and Information Schemes (ELIS)

“…In the apparel industry, Fransen (2011) and Marques (2013) studied private governance regimes and found that increased proliferation of different standards result from a high fragmentation of the industry (with respect to geography, supply chains, and power relations) as well as increasing interest of businesses to define their own rules and principles. This has resulted in the failure of some NGO-led initiatives to harmonise labour standards.…”

Sport policy convergence: a framework for analysis

“…It is further argued that while these dimensions are analytically distinct they are integral elements of a holistic understanding of policy-making and must be understood in relation to each other and the process as a whole. The identification of the seven dimensions was the outcome of a review of existing comparative analyses of sport policy (especially, 5 Bergsgard et al, 2007;De Bosscher, 2007;De Bosscher et al, 2009;Green & Houlihan, 2005;Houlihan & Green, 2008;Nicholson et al, 2011) and also a review of major comparative studies in other policy fields such as welfare (Cox, 2004;Vij, 2007), employment (Avdeyeva, 2006;Dunn, 2004;Fransen, 2011) and education (Alexiadou et al, 2010;Ozga, 2004;Raffe, 2004), Among the reviews of convergence theory those by Holzinger (2006), Bennett (1991) and Dolowitz and Marsh (2000) were particularly valuable sources informing the identification and refinement of the dimensions. The seven dimensions are summarised in Table 1 and their relationship is described in Figure 1.…”