School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications

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    Implementing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Insights from Indonesia
    Rosser, A ; Macdonald, K ; Setiawan, KMP (JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV PRESS, 2022-02-01)
    Following the endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in 2011, attention has shifted towards challenges of implementation. Through detailed analysis of the case of Indo-nesia, this article analyses the conditions under which implementation oc-curs and explores strategies for strengthened implementation. While UNGP implementation has often been argued to depend on strong collaborative learning networks, we demonstrate instead that power balances between rights coalitions and politico-business and technocratic elites have proved decisive—implementation varying across sectors and over time depending on configurations of market power, histories of rights struggles, and patterns of high-level political support.
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    Accountability in global economic governance
    MacDonald, K ; Brown, C ; Eckersley, R (Oxford University Press, 2018-04-05)
    Contemporary theoretical debates surrounding accountability in global economic governance have often adopted a problem-focused analytical lens—centred on real-world political controversies surrounding the accountability of global governing authorities. This chapter explores four distinctive problems of global accountability for which empirical inquiry has usefully informed normative analysis: first, the problem of unaccountable power within global governance processes; second, the problem of decentred political authority in global governance; third, problems establishing appropriate foundations of social power through which normatively desirable transnational accountabilities can be rendered practically effective at multiple scales; finally, problems associated with the need to traverse significant forms of social and cultural difference in negotiating appropriate normative terms of transnational accountability relationships. In relation to each, this chapter examines how systematic engagement between empirical and normative modes of analysis can both illuminate the theoretical problem and inform practical political strategies for strengthening accountability in global economic governance.
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    Private sustainability standards as tools for empowering southern pro-regulatory coalitions? Collaboration, conflict and the pursuit of sustainable palm oil
    Macdonald, K (Elsevier, 2020-01-01)
    The social and environmental impact of commodity production in the global south is now governed by an array of global market-driven standard-setting schemes, which interact with state-centred legal and administrative governance ‘on the ground’ in producing countries. Drawing on a case study of contested regulatory governance in the Indonesian palm oil sector, this paper investigates the effects of interactions between (northern) market-based and (southern) state-centred regulatory authorities. Analysis shows that it is not the collaborative or conflictual character of governance interactions that matters most in shaping regulatory capacity, but rather how such interactions influence the motivations, capacities and legitimacy claims of competing regulatory coalitions within commodity producing jurisdictions. While conflictual pathways of regulatory empowerment can sometimes be productive, their effects on destabilizing power relations between elite and marginalised actors in producing countries render them distinctively vulnerable to legitimacy challenges from incumbent powerholders. This generates dilemmas for global regulators, whose efforts to influence change through strategies of empowering southern pro-regulatory coalitions are subject to challenge from competing coalitions of southern actors.
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    Obstacles to implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in Southeast Asia
    Macdonald, K (Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2020)
    In June 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) unanimously passed the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), amidst an atmosphere of cautious optimism. These principles provided a new set of global standards for preventing and addressing adverse human rights impacts associated with business activity, and have been described as ‘the single most important innovation in the human rights and business field in the last 25 years’. Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand—members of the UNHRC at the time the UNGPs were adopted—all voted in support of the framework, and several governments in the region subsequently indicated a potential willingness to develop National Action Plans to guide implementation. Nonetheless, almost ten years since the endorsement of the UNGPs, their implementation within Southeast Asia has remained slow and uneven.
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    Pandemics, politics and principles: business and human rights in Southeast Asia in a time of crisis.
    Rosser, A ; MacDonald, K ; Setiawan, K (Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2020)
    Business activity has been a key driver of economic dynamism in Southeast Asia and one of the main reasons for the region’s growing prosperity in recent decades. It has led to increases in investment and consumption, boosted exports and, in so doing, promoted economic growth. This has in turn created jobs, improved incomes, increased governments’ ability to provide social welfare, and lifted millions out of poverty.
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    Towards a 'pluralist' world order: creative agency and legitimacy in global institutions
    Macdonald, T ; Macdonald, K (SAGE Publications, 2020-06-01)
    This article addresses the question of how we should understand the normative grounds of legitimacy in global governance institutions, given the social and organizational pluralism of the contemporary global political order. We argue that established normative accounts of legitimacy, underpinning both internationalist and cosmopolitan institutional models, are incompatible with real-world global social and organizational pluralism, insofar as they are articulated within the parameters of a ‘statist’ world order imaginary: this sees legitimacy as grounded in rational forms of political agency, exercised within ‘closed’ communities constituted by settled common interests and identities. To advance beyond these statist ideational constraints, we elaborate an alternative ‘pluralist’ world order imaginary: this sees legitimacy as partially grounded in creative forms of political agency, exercised in the constitution and ongoing transformation of a plurality of ‘open’ communities, with diverse and fluid interests and identities. Drawing on a case study analysis of political controversies surrounding the global governance of business and human rights, we argue that the pluralist imaginary illuminates how normative legitimacy in world politics can be strengthened by opening institutional mandates to contestation by multiple distinct collectives, even though doing so is incompatible with achieving a fully rationalized global institutional scheme.
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    Grappling with injustice: Corporate crime, multinational business and interrogation of law in context
    Haines, F ; Macdonald, K (SAGE Publications, 2021)
    This article interrogates criminological ambivalence towards law as both essential in the control of corporate crime and as an enabler of corporate harm. It argues we can make sense of such tensions by seeing law—in its plurality of soft and hard forms—as constituent elements within multiple fields of struggle, in which laws operate as tools wielded to influence contested rules, and as rules governing regulatory struggles. This argument is developed by bringing criminological analyses of the law’s role in business facilitation and regulatory enforcement together with sociological analyses of ‘fields of struggle’. The value of this approach in illuminating law’s ambiguous role in relation to corporate harm is illustrated through two cases of multinational business activity in Indonesia.
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    Containing conflict: Authoritative transnational actors and the management of company-community conflict
    MacDonald, K ; Malet, D ; Anderson, M (Georgetown University Press, 2017-01-01)
    Amidst intensified competition for land available to private investors in sectors such as mining, agribusiness and forestry, disputes over land between transnational investors and local communities are emerging in many parts of the world as an increasingly visible form of transnational conflict. Whereas land conflicts were once seen as a quintessentially ‘local’ problem, to be managed by national or sub-national political authorities, they are now becoming transnationally politicized. Such conflicts may be expressed in episodes of violent confrontation between members of local communities and police, military or private security officials. At other times, they take the form of non-violent resistance or protest, or are channeled through formal political, administrative or legal channels for managing social and political contestation.
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    Restricted entitlements for skilled temporary migrants: the limits of migrant consent
    Boese, M ; Macdonald, K (Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2017-01-01)
    Temporary labour migration programmes have often attracted significant controversy, particularly with regard to provisions that restrict the social entitlements available to temporary migrant workers, compared with other categories of residents. Advocates of such restrictions have argued that migrants freely choose to participate in temporary migration schemes on the prevailing terms, and are free to leave at any time if such participation no longer serves their interests. Our central goal in this paper is to critically evaluate such consent-based justifications for restricted social entitlements of temporary migrant workers, with reference to empirical evidence concerning the practical social and economic conditions of choice experienced by these temporary migrants. Drawing on evidence from one major receiving country – Australia – we show that consent-based justifications for restricted social entitlements fail to fully account for either the practical complexity of individual migration choices, or the de facto operation of Australia’s skilled temporary migration programme as a ‘test run’ for potential future permanent residents or citizens. By bringing sociological analysis of lived migrant experiences into critical engagement with normative debates about restricted social entitlements, we contribute to the bridging of empirical and normative migration debates, which too often evolve in parallel.
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    Social governance in a global economy: Introduction to an evolving agenda
    Macdonald, K ; Marshall, S (Ashgate, 2010-12-01)