Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: In order to address challenges resulting from interactions between transnational private sustainability standard organizations, initiatives emerge that meta-govern these standards. Contrary to prevailing understandings in public policy literature, such meta-governance initiatives are mostly run by nongovernmental rather than governmental actors. While literature presents the sustainability standards field as predominantly governed by one meta-governor, ISEAL, it is hardly recognized that, alongside ISEAL, rival meta-governance initiatives are proliferating. These initiatives occur in similar sectors and issue fields, use quite similar modes of meta-governance and interact with each other. This paper explains the multiple emergence of meta-governance in the governance of sustainability standards in agriculture. It shows how meta-governance efforts are developed by political coalitions of nongovernmental actors with divergent views on and priorities in making production more sustainable. It therefore reveals the mechanism through which meta-governance of coordination problems among cross-border self-organizing governance arrangements may end up reproducing these coordination problems, rather than addressing them.
Source: Policy Sciences
Author: Luc Fransen
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,190
OpenAlex ID: W636987708