At a moment when the limits of voluntary governance and the protracted development of binding regulation in Business and Human Rights (BHR) continue to attract sustained scrutiny, Global Business and Local Struggle: Reimagining Non-Judicial Remedy for Human Rights offers a timely and empirically grounded intervention into one of the field’s most enduring questions: to what extent, and under what conditions, can non-judicial mechanisms (NJMs) meaningfully support affected rightsholders in their pursuit of effective remedy in cases of transnational business-related human rights harm? Drawing on an ambitious, multi-year research programme, Connor, Delaney, Haines, Macdonald, and Marshall move beyond evaluating the performance of NJMs to reconceptualising their role within a broader, pluralised ecosystem of transnational accountability.
A central strength of the book lies in its robust empirical foundation. Based on five years of fieldwork followed by a further five years of systematic data analysis, the authors draw on an extensive evidentiary base comprising 587 interviews with more than 1,100 participants across India and Indonesia.Footnote 1 This sustained engagement yields rare, fine-grained insights into ten case studies involving a diverse range of transnational NJMs, including the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, OECD National Contact Points, the Rainforest Alliance, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) accountability framework, REDD+ initiatives, and multi-stakeholder schemes such as the Ethical Trading Initiative and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.Footnote 2
By tracing how these institutionally heterogeneous mechanisms function in practice across different industries and socio-political contexts, the authors move beyond formal mandates and institutional design to illuminate what they term a ‘field of struggle’: a dynamic space in which rightsholders, civil society actors, corporations, and institutional intermediaries interact, negotiate, and contest outcomes.Footnote 3 Within this field, NJMs do not operate as neutral or technocratic instruments, but as sites shaped by power asymmetries, strategic behaviour, and shifting alignments of interests. This analytical move is particularly significant, as it situates NJMs within broader socio-political struggles over accountability and remedy. It is this combination of conceptual innovation and empirical depth that distinguishes the study from much of the existing BHR literature, which has often relied either on doctrinal analysis or on more narrowly bounded case studies.
The book opens with ten detailed case narratives from India and Indonesia across three sectors frequently associated with human rights harms: agribusiness, mining and apparel. These cases foreground the lived experiences of workers and local communities engaging with grievance mechanisms, demonstrating that the capacity of NJMs to support rightsholders is contingent on a range of social, political and institutional factors. The authors show how these mechanisms are embedded within a broader field of struggle, in which outcomes are shaped by power relations, strategic action and competing interests.
Chapter 2 turns to the normative architecture of NJMs, examining their purposes and institutional design. It critically engages with prevailing standards of ‘effectiveness’, such as accessibility, predictability and legitimacy, rather than accepting them at face value. The analysis is structured around four interrelated dimensions: meaningful participation, socialisation and learning, institutional capacity and the forms of leverage and authority through which businesses are encouraged or compelled to engage with non-judicial processes.
Chapter 3 tests these design principles against the case studies, revealing a clear gap between formal expectations and practice. Although some mechanisms appear to meet the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) effectiveness criteria, this does not consistently translate into meaningful outcomes, particularly in addressing structural power imbalances.Footnote 4 The chapter also questions the universality of these criteria, suggesting that they may not be equally applicable across contexts and may, in certain instances, prove counterproductive. Where positive outcomes do emerge, they tend to depend significantly on external factors rather than on the mechanisms themselves. The authors further observe that outcomes often fall short of constituting substantive remedy, frequently taking the form of short-term gains rather than addressing underlying structural issues.Footnote 5
The analytical pivot occurs in Chapter 4, which reconceptualises NJMs as interventions within fields of struggle, contested, relational spaces in which actors pursue competing interests around shared claims to remedy. Drawing on socio-legal and political economy scholarship, the authors offer a nuanced account of the multiple sources of power, corporate, state and civil society, and the ways in which these are mobilised and contested.Footnote 6
Chapter 5 develops this perspective by examining how rightsholders use NJMs as a source of leverage. While NJMs rarely exercise power independently, they can enable communities to mobilise normative claims, increase scrutiny, and create spaces for negotiation. Their broader potential lies in reshaping fields of struggle across levels; however, this potential remains limited where connections between local and transnational dynamics are weak.Footnote 7 Chapter 6 introduces the state as a conflicted actor, simultaneously facilitating corporate activity and bearing responsibility for rights protection, thereby complicating the operation of NJMs.Footnote 8
The findings are synthesised in Chapter 7, which underscores that NJMs are rarely effective as standalone mechanisms but can play a conditional and supportive role within broader accountability strategies. Chapter 8 builds on this by proposing a reform-oriented framework grounded in responsive institutional design, offering practical guidance both for communities and for NJMs. It also reflects on the implications for the development of a legally binding treaty on BHR, suggesting ways in which such an instrument might more effectively integrate NJMs within a strengthened accountability architecture.
Overall, the book offers a deliberately complex and at times unsettling account of NJMs, resisting reductive classifications of success or failure. Its central contribution lies in demonstrating that the effectiveness of NJMs cannot be adequately captured through the UNGPs effectiveness criteria alone, which remain largely procedural. Instead, authority, leverage and the ability to navigate relationships across diverse actors emerge as more decisive factors. The book advances a more expansive conception of remedy, moving beyond a narrow emphasis on formal legal remedies, typically conceived as discrete, one-off outcomes such as monetary compensation or declaratory or symbolic forms of redress, to encompass more systemic approaches aimed at addressing underlying structural causes, ensuring non-repetition, and facilitating longer-term transformative change. This broader conception aligns with more transformative approaches in international human rights law, while also highlighting the practical limitations of achieving such outcomes through NJMs alone.
At the same time, the analysis draws attention to the fragmented nature of transnational accountability. The capacity of NJMs to connect local and international dynamics remains uneven, and where such linkages are weak, gains at higher levels often fail to translate into meaningful change on the ground. This reinforces the book’s central claim that NJMs must be understood relationally, as embedded within a wider ecology of actors and strategies.
A further area that could have been developed concerns the book’s engagement with a human rights-based analytical framework. While the analysis offers a compelling account of power and practice, a more explicit integration of core human rights principles, such as participation, accountability and equality, might have provided an additional layer of normative clarity.Footnote 9 This could have further strengthened the connection between the book’s rich empirical insights and broader human rights debates on the role of NJMs in promoting the meaningful realisation of rights.
Taken together, the book makes a significant contribution by reorienting BHR scholarship towards a more grounded and context-sensitive understanding of remedy in NJMs, attentive to complexity, power, and contestation.
