School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemSocial governance in a global economy: Introduction to an evolving agenda(Ashgate, 2010-12-01)
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ItemExperiments in globalizing justice: Emergent lessons and future trajectories(Ashgate Publishing, Limited, 2010-01-01)Civic, corporate and state-based governance initiatives that seek to promote norms of social or global ‘justice’ are achieving steadily rising levels of reach and influence in the global economy. More seem to be emerging every day, and their legitimacy as mechanisms of local, national and transnational regulation is achieving increasing acceptance in many quarters. They perform a range of functions – from delivering social services and facilitating economic redistribution and poverty reduction, to establishing, monitoring and enforcing social and labour standards within global production systems across large parts of the industrialized and developing worlds. Although the patterns of their diffusion are still limited and highly uneven, it is important to understand the forces that drive them, the mechanisms and actors through which they operate, and the factors that condition their success or failure.
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ItemGlobal democracy for a partially joined-up world: Toward a multi-level system of public power and democratic governance?(Cambridge University Press, 2011-01-01)
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ItemFair Labor Association(Polity Press, 2011)The Fair Labor Association (FLA) is a US-based voluntary governance arrangement in which a number of high profile apparel and sportswear companies work together with universities and NGOs to promote compliance with core international labour standards within their supply chains. Since its establishment in the late 1990s, the Association has attracted significant attention and debate. Advocates of the Association regard it as a leader in developing innovative approaches to promoting compliance with international labour standards, pointing to its progress toward building independent auditing and complaints processes, and its efforts in recent years to strengthen the capacity building dimensions of its compliance program. In contrast, critics question both the Association’s accountability and its effectiveness, highlighting what they perceive to be its corporate-dominated governance structure, and its ongoing failure to achieve compliance with international labour standards within the supply chains of many FLA members.
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ItemThe Fair Trade System(Polity Press, 2011)The contemporary fair trade system has a distinctive, hybrid character as a production and trading network, a social governance arrangement, and a transnational social movement. From the perspective of global governance innovation, it can perhaps be best conceptualised as an ‘alternative’ normative and institutional system to both organise and govern production and trade. Its central purpose is to operate an alternative market through which commodities can be produced and traded on terms that promote sustainable social development among marginalized workers and producers, particularly those in the global South.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDemocracy in a Pluralist Global Order: Corporate Power and Stakeholder Representation(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2010-01-01)Whereas representative democratic mechanisms have generally been built around preexisting institutional structures of sovereign states, the global political domain lacks any firmly constitutionalized or sovereign structures that could constitute an analogous institutional backbone within a democratic global order. Instead, global public power can best be characterized as “pluralist” in structure. Some recent commentators have argued that if global democratization is to succeed at all, it must proceed along a trajectory beginning with the construction of global sovereign institutions and culminating in the establishment of representative institutions to control them. This paper challenges this view of the preconditions for global democratization, arguing that democratization can indeed proceed at a global level in the absence of sovereign structures of public power. In order to gain firmer traction on these questions, analysis focuses on the prospects for democratic control of corporate power, as constituted and exercised in one particular institutional context: sectoral supply chain systems of production and trade. It is argued that global democratization cannot be straightforwardly achieved simply by replicating familiar representative democratic institutions (based on constitutional separations of powers and electoral control) on a global scale. Rather, it is necessary to explore alternative institutional means for establishing representative democratic institutions at the global level within the present pluralist structure of global power.