Bargains old and new: Multinational corporations in global governance (original) (raw)
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Bargains Old and New: Multinationals in International Governance
This paper outlines an approach for understanding the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in global governance. We develop a typology of regime types with two dimensions, the goal of the regime, which can be market enabling or regulatory, and the location of authority, which can be national, regional, or international, with public and private elements. MNCs tend to support the creation of market enabling regimes at the international level, and prefer to keep social or environmental regulation under national or private authority. However, these are only generalizations and MNCs develop preferences based on their relative influence in various arenas, the costs of political participation, and competitive considerations. We argue that institutions of global governance represent the outcome of a series of negotiations among corporations, states, and non-state actors. The preferences and power of MNCs vary across issues and sectors, and from one negotiating forum to another, accounting for the uneven and fragmented nature of the resulting system. Our approach differs from the traditional FDI bargaining framework in that it recognizes the multi-party nature of negotiations and multiple sources of power. Moreover, the complexity and dynamic nature of the process results in a somewhat indeterminate process.
Open Journal of Political Science
Multinational corporations (MNCs) have become the most powerful drivers of integration and structural changes in today’s global economy. MNCs have not completely subordinated States and markets in shaping the global economy, but they have transformed the world and given rise to a new set of economic, political, social, cultural and legal problems. Yet, quite ironically, MNCs are now facing a recombination that tends to subordinate them to transnational networks of corporate economic power. The thorny issue of regulating the global economy is, in this context, even more complex as regulatory systems of global governance must be built to fit those transnational networks superseding States and firms. This article presents an overview of the most important theories in international political economy on MNCs in order to situate the new theoretical challenges pertaining to the understanding of contemporary structural changes in the world economy and their incidences on global governance. ...
Who’s in charge? Corporations as institutions of global governance
2015
In most accounts of global governance, where corporations are included, they are seen as either subject to various international organisations’ regulatory impact or are identified as having (benign or malign) influence over agenda setting around the scope and practices of global regulation. However, here I examine a third dimension that has hitherto been under recognised: this article starts to develop an analysis of the terrain that global corporations govern themselves, sometime singularly, sometimes collectively and sometimes collaborating with the more “normal” institutions of global governance. I seek to develop an account of how the corporation governs this terrain and the mechanisms that businesses have developed (or utilised) to maintain their authority. I suggest that it makes sense to understand global corporations as directly analogous to more “normal” institutions of global governance, and that discussion and analysis of global governance needs to integrate this third dimension if it is to examine the full spectrum of governance beyond the state. This article is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to global governance.
Non-Triad Multinational Enterprises and Global Economic Institutions (2011)
During the last years, we have witnessed a surge in multinational enterprises from outside the traditional triad (Japan, North America and Western Europe). While acquisitions by these companies have raised considerable concerns within the affected economies, the focus of this contribution is on a more indirect and structural implication of the rise of Non-Triad Multinational Enterprises (NTMNEs), i.e. their role as transnational actors in shaping global economic institutions. Global economic institutions such as the WTO do not only provide important political frameworks for MNEs and their transnational production systems, but also are important focal points for their political activities. Over the last decades, most triad MNEs have transcended their traditional limitation to lobbying on the national level, and have begun to involve themselves directly within global economic regulations, either by acting as transnational lobbies, or by setting up rules themselves, within transnational private self-governance or public-private partnerships. Obviously, we need to know whether non-triad MNEs are any different. The contribution demonstrates that the behaviour of NTMNEs with regard to global economic institutions is still rather low-key. This observation stands at a marked contrast to the rather noisy statements of some non-triad governments, e.g. with regard to WTO negotiations or global currency questions. In order to solve this puzzle, the paper puts forward two complementing hypotheses. One of these hypotheses looks at the substance of global economic rules and compares these rules with the domestic regulatory environment of NTMNEs. From this perspective, conflicts between NTMNEs and global economic institutions are rather rare, given the lack of binding global rules in those cases where preferences of non-triad enterprises and international institutions diverge. The second hypothesis looks at the mode of global economic regulation, in particular at the division of responsibilities between companies and governments in rule-setting. From this perspective, the low-key approach of NTMNEs might be explained by the closer collaboration between these companies and their home governments. Correspondingly, they are less relevant as transnational actors in global economic institutions given that their preferences are mainly articulated via governmental channels.
Potentia: Journal of International Affairs, 2017
Throughout the last two decades, institutions of global security and governance have undergone a paradigmatic shift in their engagements with multinational corporations (MNCs). The United Nations, in particular, has increasingly embraced big business as “partner” in human security, humanitarian response and development through formalized “global public–private partnerships” (GP3s). Naturally, a debate has emerged on the efficacies of these GP3s and their implications for global governance. This paper contributes to this debate by proposing and employing a new research agenda that interrogates the impacts that GP3s have on international institutions themselves using a case study of a particular UN agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It will argue that UNHCR GP3s are a highly asymmetrical set of power relations that are having constitutive effects on the agency. The UNHCR is undergoing significant operational and ideological changes in the GP3 process in...
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2011
Transnational corporations are at the center of extraordinary and complex governance systems that are developing outside the state and international public organizations and beyond the conventionally legitimating framework of the forms of domestic or international hard law. Though these systems are sometimes recognized as autonomous and authoritative among its members, they are neither isolated from each other nor from the states with which they come into contact. Together these systems may begin to suggest a new template for networked governance beyond the state, but one in which public and private actors are integrated stakeholders. This provides the source of the questions explored in this article: Is it possible to detect this new template for transnational governance of economic activity (in general) and corporations (in particular) developing through principles of transnational private governance? Is public governance in the twentyfirst century taking on the characteristics of transnational corporate governance? The questions suggest three objectives. The first is to examine the organization of communities of states through the normative lens of private transnational governance. A secondary objective is to
Journal of Law and Society, 2011
A. INTRODUCTION Much of today's writing on 'global governance' presumes a fundamental gap between the domestic forms, institutions and instruments of legal regulation on the one hand and what is perceived as a dramatic regulatory void on the global scale on the other. This anxiety is particularly accentuated with regard to border-crossing, global corporate activity, which is seen as having over time successfully escaped the reach of traditional, nation state-based forms of regulation. As the literature on the challenges of regulating the conduct of multinational business corporations [MNCs] has been growing exponentially, the contention remains, however, whether or not an answer to this alleged exhaustion of the regulatory state in the fact of global corporate (mis-)conduct is likely to be found in the extension of the regulatory grasp of the nation state-or of international state bodies-in a kind of 'expanded jurisdiction' sense. By contrast, what appears to emerge from a continuing, rich assessment by lawyers 2 , political scientists 3 and economists 4 with the corporate, labour law and human rights dimensions of MNC is a growing awareness of the need to approach the problem from what has fruitfully been re-1 I am grateful for comments from Fabrizio Cafaggi, Martin Böhmer, and Jacco Bomhoff and the participants of the