School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailablePrivate sustainability standards as tools for empowering southern pro-regulatory coalitions? Collaboration, conflict and the pursuit of sustainable palm oil(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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ItemObstacles to implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in Southeast Asia(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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ItemPandemics, politics and principles: business and human rights in Southeast Asia in a time of crisis.(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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ItemTowards a 'pluralist' world order: creative agency and legitimacy in global institutions(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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ItemRestricted entitlements for skilled temporary migrants: the limits of migrant consent(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.