From Constructive Ambiguity to Escalating Commitment: The Evolution of the Bangladesh Accord as a Transnational Institution for Collective Action

We investigate a core challenge in building multi-stakeholder institutions forcollective action: Constructive ambiguity—the deliberate use of imprecise lan-guage on a contested issue—is often needed to overcome conflict and enableagreement among parties. Yet, this initially enabling characteristic may compli-cate implementation when ambiguous commitments must be translated intoconcrete actions. To examine this challenge, we draw on an eight-year studyof the Bangladesh Accord for Fire and Building Safety, an agreement amongunions, NGOs, and more than 200 company signatories to end a series ofdeadly incidents that occurred in the Bangladesh garment sector. We revealthat, despite the risk of diluting the agreement during implementation, a multi-phase political process triggered a reinforcing process of escalating commit-ment, leading to the institution’s expansion in scale and scope. This processinvolved signatories negotiating more-stringent commitments, on the onehand, and stakeholder dynamics activating cascading layers of commitmentenforcement, on the other, which drove signatories toward deeper institutionaltie-in (i.e., stake) with the collective action institution. The process resulted intransforming constructive ambiguity into a catalyst for a robust collective actioninstitution. We develop a model that explains how collective rationality canemerge and direct private interests to resolve transnational collective actionproblems.