School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemScaling-up sustainable commodity governance through jurisdictional initiatives: Political pathways to sector transformation in the Indonesian palm oil sector?(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2024-04)Voluntary systems of sustainable commodity governance have come under intensified criticism for failing to catalyse transformative change beyond directly regulated supply chains. In response, there has been a surge of efforts to ‘scale-up’ sustainability impacts through governance interventions at landscape and jurisdictional scales. While these ambitious, scaled-up approaches are attracting significant interest, such approaches demand substantial changes to established repertoires of policy interventions and associated understandings of the pathways through which these contribute to sustainability outcomes. Drawing theoretical insights from scholarship on multi-stakeholder sustainability governance together with findings from a qualitative study of jurisdictional governance experiments in the Indonesian palm oil sector, this paper explores how emerging jurisdictional initiatives are promoting change pathways towards more sustainable commodity production, and how the political, environmental governance and economic contexts in which these interventions are implemented influence these pathways. Analysis shows that by integrating a distinctive mix of market and policy-driven interventions, jurisdictional approaches are contributing to three core pathways of change, centred respectively on network and coalition-building, collaborative governance, and resource mobilisation. However, which of these pathways are most influential, how interventions are sequenced and operationalised, and how the pathways interact in shaping change is highly sensitive to varied subnational implementation contexts, with important implications for the impact and resilience of jurisdictional programs. These findings highlight the need for jurisdictional policy interventions to respond flexibly to contextually-variable configurations of actor interests, coalitions and power relations within contested multi-scalar processes of sustainable commodity governance.
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ItemNGOs as Agents of Global Justice: Cosmopolitan Activism for Political Realists(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2022)Abstract Several decades of scholarship on international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have established their important role in leading cosmopolitan political projects framed around moral ideals of global justice. But contemporary legitimacy crises in international liberalism call for a reexamination of NGOs’ global justice activism, considering how they should navigate the real-world moral contestations and shifting power dynamics that can impede their pursuit of justice. Recent work by deliberative-democratic theorists has argued that NGOs can help resolve disputes about global justice norms by facilitating legitimate communicative exchanges among the diverse political voices of subjected global communities on the correct interpretation and implementation of global justice norms. In response, this essay argues for an expanded account of the political roles of NGOs in global justice activism, which reflects greater sensitivity to the multifaceted political dynamics through which power in real-world global politics is constituted and contested. It is shown that in some NGOs’ real-world operational contexts, structural power imbalances and social division or volatility can undercut the operation of the ideal deliberative processes prescribed by democratic theory—calling for further attention to work focused on mitigating power imbalances, building solidarity, and organizing power in parallel or as a precursor to deliberative-democratic processes.
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ItemThe politics of norm domestication in private transnational business regulation: A typology and illustrations(Wiley, 2020)Scholars and practitioners of global private business regulation have often recognised the importance of political and institutional dynamics “on the ground,” in shaping the degree to which social and environmental regulatory norms are institutionalised or resisted at the local level. Local dynamics of norm contestation generate dilemmas for global regulators who aspire to be responsive to varied contexts in producing countries without “watering down” global regulatory agendas. Drawing on a range of empirical illustrations from Southeast Asia and Latin America, this paper develops a typology of domestication strategies currently being used by global private regulators and examines the effects of these strategies on supporting or undermining the overall values and purposes of global regulatory agendas. In the presence of pervasive local contestation surrounding global regulatory norms, norm domestication strategies are shown to offer important means of countering challenges to the power and legitimacy of global regulators. Nonetheless, the effects of such strategies remain highly contingent on path‐dependent contests between competing regulatory coalitions at both local and global levels.
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ItemResource governance and norm domestication in the developing world(Wiley-Blackwell, 2020-01-01)
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ItemRegulating sustainable minerals in electronics supply chains: local power struggles and the 'hidden costs' of global tin supply chain governance(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-05-04)Voluntary supply chain regulation has proliferated in recent decades in response to concerns about the social and environmental impacts of global production and trade. Yet the capacity of supply chain regulation to influence production practices on the ground has been persistently questioned. Through empirical analysis of transnational regulatory interventions in the Indonesian tin sector—centered on a multi-stakeholder Tin Working Group established by prominent global electronics brands—this paper explores the challenges and limits of voluntary supply chain governance as it interacts with an entrenched ‘extractive settlement’ in Indonesia’s major tin producing islands of Bangka and Belitung. Although the Tin Working Group has introduced localized initiatives to tackle issues such as worker safety and improved land rehabilitation, it has also contributed in diffuse and largely unintended ways to consolidating the power of political and economic elites who benefit from centralized control over resource extraction. In this sense, supply chain governance has generated ‘hidden costs’ through unintended effects on power struggles between competing social groups at national and sub-national levels—generating marginal benefits for ameliorating specific regulatory ‘problems’, while consolidating and reproducing barriers to deeper transitions towards inclusive or sustainable regimes of extractive governance.
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ItemNonjudicial business regulation and community access to remedy(Wiley, 2020)Redress for communities harmed by transnational business activity remains elusive. This paper examines community efforts to access redress for human rights-related harms via recourse to transnational nonjudicial mechanisms (NJMs) – a prevalent but widely debated instrument of transnational business regulation. Drawing together insights from theoretical debates surrounding nonjudicial regulation and evidence from a major empirical study of human rights redress claims in Indonesia and India, the paper explores the conditions under which NJMs can support community access to remedy. Three conditions are shown to be central in enabling some degree of NJM effectiveness: the institutional design of regulatory strategies, the institutional empowerment of regulatory institutions, and social empowerment of affected communities and their supporters. While all three conditions are required in some measure to underpin effective NJM interventions, these conditions can be combined in varying ways in different contexts to underpin either top–down or bottom–up pathways to redress. The former derives its primary influence from institutional authority and capacity, while the latter relies more heavily on diffuse societal leverage in support of community claims. These findings have significant implications for theoretical debates about the capacity and limits of nonjudicial regulatory approaches to support human rights redress within decentered contexts of transnational regulation where both regulatory power and agency are widely diffused.
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ItemEthical Consumerism: A Defense of Market Vigilantism(Wiley, 2018)There are many ways in which people can try, acting alone or with others, to change the world for the better. They can engage in political activism or volunteer work or provide financial support for others who do so. They can also act through the medium of the market by providing incentives for change—for example, through paying a higher price for fair‐trade coffee or threatening to withhold purchases in response to the wrongful conduct of other market actors.
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ItemTransnational policy influence and the politics of legitimation(Wiley, 2019)Many domains of transnational policy are now governed through dynamic, multilevel governance processes, encompassing transnational, national, and subnational scales. In such settings, both membership of policy communities and distributions of authority within them become more fluid and openly contested—increasing the importance of the politics of legitimation as a basis for distributing influence over policy processes and outcomes. Drawing on insights from theories of organizational and institutional legitimation, this article theorizes three distinctive strategies of policy influence exercised by transnational actors in multilevel governance settings, through which strategic efforts to legitimize transnational actors and forums are deployed as means of transnational policy influence. The three strategies involve: transnational field building, localized network building, and role adaptation. The effects of these influencing strategies on policy processes and outcomes are illustrated with reference to the case of Indonesian land governance, in which highly dynamic, contested, and multiscalar governance processes lend our theorized strategies particular salience.
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ItemNo Preview Available"Post-conflict" reconstruction, the crimes of the powerful and transitional justice(Pluto Journals, 2017-03-01)Periods of armed conflict can generate significant ruptures in the political, economic, cultural and legal life of affected regions. As societies gradually transition from a state of war to a state of peace--conditions that are often unstable and transitory --civil society, governments and legal authorities are frequently weakened by internal divisions, resource gaps, organizational fragility and widespread perceptions of illegitimacy. Furthermore, the immediate demands of the transitional process (including efforts to promote transitional justice) can channel finite civil society resources into peacemaking and reconciliation initiatives, drawing attention away--whether inadvertently or by design--from state and corporate accountability.
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ItemThe Role of Beneficiaries in Transnational Regulatory Processes(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2017-03)The editors of this volume highlight the role of intermediaries, alongside regulators and targets, as a way to better understand the outcomes of regulatory processes. Here, we explore the benefits of distinguishing a fourth category of actors: the groups whose interests the rules are meant to protect, the (intended) beneficiaries. We apply that framework to nonstate regulation of labor conditions, where the primary intended beneficiaries are workers and their families, especially in poorer countries. We first outline the different ways in which beneficiaries can relate to regulators, intermediaries, and targets; we then develop conjectures about the effect of different relationships on regulatory impacts and democratic legitimacy in relation to corporate power structures, specifically those embedded in the governance of global supply chains. We illustrate these conjectures primarily with examples from three initiatives—Rugmark, the Fair Labor Association, and the Fairtrade system. We conclude that it matters whether and how beneficiaries are included in the regulatory process.