Transnational Private Environmental Regulation: Are States Striking Back?

To be published in Research Handbook on Environmental Regulation, David Williamson, Gary Lynch-Wood & Agne Prochorskaite, eds. Rapid global trade expansion beginning in the 1990s spawned a parallel expansion in non-state (‘private’) environmental regulatory (PER) programs. They issue regulatory standards, monitor and judge performance, sanction poor performance, and sometimes regulate state activities. PER programs constitute extensive and complex transnational governance agglomerations encompassing environmental certification, corporate social responsibility, and environment-society-governance programs, typically intertwined with governmental and intergovernmental regulatory programs. Using forestry and climate change examples, this article analyzes key features of PER programs, how they may be growing empirically more binding despite their formally voluntary status, and their changing relationships with governments. It finds that PER’s pull on behavior appears to be growing but is subject to new political headwinds. The EU is moving to conscript PER to its ambitious regulatory purposes while the US remains ambivalent, and China manages it in a controlled way. Most other countries either passively accept or affirmatively deploy PER programs for their policy goals. [Note: This paper is under preparation for the forthcoming Research Handbook on Environmental Regulation, edited by David Williamson, Gary Lynch-Wood and Agne Prochorskaite. Length constraints and citation format, along with the expansive topic, preclude citing a full complement of the excellent literature available on this subject. This article is a foundational step for ongoing work on the implications of rising authoritarianism and populism for transnational private environmental regulation.]