Consumers concerned with their environmental and social impacts today can choose from a plethora of sustainably certified products. Behind such labels, such as organic or fair trade, stand private governance organizations that have taken over regulatory functions from the state by setting production standards, monitoring producers, and enforcing compliance. Yet, in some cases the state strikes back. For instance, organic certified products in the European Union (EU) need to comply with minimum criteria set by EU law and carry a mandatory EU organic logo. Such public policy intervention intends to protect consumers from false claims and increase the credibility of the organic market. However, European consumers of fair trade products are not awarded equal protection, because no regulatory intervention has occurred in the fair trade policy space.

Stefan Renckens’s Private Governance and Public Authority engages with this empirical puzzle by asking these questions: Under what conditions do public authorities intervene in private governance activities? What forms does such intervention take? And what are its implications? Renckens examines these questions in the EU policy context by studying the development of (non-)intervention in four cases—the private governance of organic agriculture, biofuels production, fair trade, and fisheries—to which he dedicates one chapter each.

The book distinguishes between two types of public intervention. “Standards regulation” intervenes in private governance schemes’ substantive rulemaking around production processes, as well as the communication of compliance with such standards. “Procedural regulation,” in contrast, is concerned with schemes’ governance procedures, such as membership rules, processes to set and revise standards, and the organization of compliance verification. This functional distinction is a welcome conceptual addition to the evolving debate around public–private governance interactions, which to date has been dominated by interaction typologies focusing on outcomes such as collaboration, competition, and coexistence (see Benjamin Cashore, Jette Steen Knudsen, Jeremy Moon, and Hamish van der Ven, eds., “Private Authority and Public Policy in Global Context: Governance Spheres for Problem Solving,” Regulation & Governance, special issue, 2020).

Moreover, these distinct forms of intervention ground Renckens’s theoretical argument. He argues that public authorities such as the EU intervene in private governance for two reasons: to support domestic producers (when they are the rule targets of private governance) or to solve issues related to the fragmentation of the private governance market (such as information asymmetries or trade distortions). The particular reason for intervention then matches its form: interest in producer support will more likely lead to “standards regulation,” for instance by creating standards that are better adapted to domestic producers’ capacities. Concerns over fragmentation, in contrast, will more likely result in “procedural regulation” in an effort to level the playing field and distinguish credible certification schemes. If both reasons are at play, such as in the case of organic agriculture, both standards and procedural regulation will take place. If neither is perceived to be sufficiently important, such as in the case of fair trade, no intervention will occur. Renckens furthermore highlights the political agency of private governance schemes, which may lobby public authorities for outcomes that allow them to “survive as rulemaking governors” (p. 31).

In spelling out and illustrating this theoretical framework via the four case studies, Private Governance and Public Authority makes a timely and important contribution to the private governance literature and provides new perspectives on public policy making in the EU. Although the private governance field has moved away from its earlier focus on private governance schemes that virtually ignored the public policy space, few works have focused such concerted attention on public policy making about private governance. Renckens further demonstrates an unparalleled understanding of both the labyrinthine EU policy-making process and multiple complex policy areas. His book thus provides a well-structured theoretical starting point for scholars aiming to understand public intervention in private governance, as well as a near-encyclopedic overview of the legislative developments at the EU level for each of the four issue areas.

The book, however, has a number of limitations, some of which Renckens freely acknowledges. The first is that the inductive theory is built on four case studies that differ in issue area, but not in public authority. This allows for greater comparability but means that the resulting theory is strongly reflective of the EU policy-making process. Indeed, Renckens recognizes that “as the EU is a unique polity—not a typical state, federal polity, or international organization—we cannot assume that similar dynamics, as discussed in this book, are at play in other polities” (p. 22). Although the final chapter makes some first probes into how the framework might travel and finds interesting contenders for both substantive and procedural regulation, it explicitly does not intend to “develop shadow cases and test the explanatory framework” (p. 212). This is a shame, because it would have greatly helped the book to show that it not only covers “private governance and the European Union” but also “public authority” writ large. Such additional cases could have also fully populated the four categories of his two-by-two theoretical model, because the four case studies at hand only show “standards and procedural regulation” (organic and biofuels) or “no regulation” (fair trade and fisheries), with no clear examples of only substantive or only procedural regulation.

The final chapter also discusses distinct features of the EU that should be taken into account when generalizing the framework, notably its unique position that requires it to integrate a large market while also holding regulatory competencies over many producers. Yet, Renckens does not cover other features common to the EU but not to other polities that may be of relevance as a necessary condition for the main conditions to hold, such as a prior policy commitment to sustainability. He also treats the four cases as independent from each other, although they took place over approximately the same time period and likely influenced each other via policy learning. Little attention is paid to such cross-pollination of ideas and experiences, with the exception of the fair trade movement learning from the organic sector’s experience (p. 211).

Finally, with its focus on certification schemes as lobbying actors, as well as on the importance of domestic producer interests, the book appears to be making a strong case for interest group politics as the real underlying reason for public (non-)intervention. It is notable that both theorized causes for action rely on stated perceptions by the public authority—of the perceived benefits to producers from intervention and the perceived problems stemming from fragmentation. Indeed, in some cases the perception of such problems shifted over time (e.g., the problematic state of fisheries standards fragmentation). In other cases, contrary interests may be at play within the same constituency; for example, between compliant organic farmers wishing to retain a high barrier to market entry and noncompliant ones wishing for standards regulation. This raises the issues of what happened behind the scenes, why certain interest groups were present at the discussion while others were absent, and why certain groups were more successful at having their voices heard. The treatment of the case studies in Renckens’s book, although meticulous in detailing what happened, still relies heavily on official documents and statements that give us less information on why any one side prevailed. The Realpolitik of public intervention in private authority is thus an interesting next step for future research.