It is a truism in the study of global environmental governance that there is little to be expected soon in the form of binding multilateral treaties, especially on imminent problems like climate change. Yet there is a great deal thought to be going on in environmental governance, even if the diverse origins, nature, and impact of current governance initiatives are still only being sketched. This book is a welcome entrée into that mapping effort, offering a persuasive framework for identifying and analyzing private authority at the international level. The usefulness of the framework is illustrated here by extended empirical studies—both quantitative and qualitative—of private authority in the environmental issue area, although its insights seem likely to be relevant for other global domains as well.
In this book, private authority is formally defined as “situations in which nonstate actors make rules or set standards that other actors in world politics adopt” (p. 6; italics in original). That definition is not as original as Jessica F. Green’s further splitting of the concept between private authority that is delegated by states to private actors, raising principal—agent dilemmas, and private authority that is entrepreneurial, or based in private actors’ own authority initiatives. With the latter, a primary challenge is to have those initiatives adopted and translated into controls over other actors. This division between delegated and entrepreneurial private authority allows a focus not just on when private authority exists but also on which form it takes.
Theoretically, Rethinking Private Authority is about the emergence of new institutions. Green argues that emergence depends on demand for such institutions to reduce transaction costs, increase the credibility of commitments, offer a first-mover advantage to early adopters of environmental rules, and contribute to the reputation or branding of the adopting organization. Emergence also depends on the existence of “actors capable of creating rules and securing consent” (p. 15), usually on the basis of their expertise. Once again, her further analysis of the kind of private authority that is created is the more creative part of the story. On that issue, she expects states to delegate authority to private actors when major states have largely agreed on a course of action and there is a strong focal institution that can be a locus for their expectations for, and control of, the delegated authority. When those conditions do not hold, any private authority can arise from the entrepreneurial efforts of the actors themselves. My summary here captures the analytic institutionalist skeleton of Green’s argument, while her own presentation of it is richer in the details and experiences of global environmental governance.
The distinction between delegated and entrepreneurial private authority is likely to be the major conceptual contribution of this book, both for its analytical elegance and because it works empirically, as illustrated in subsequent chapters. Two quantitative chapters, based on substantial and careful original work in constructing data sets, show that the patterning of the two kinds of authority has been quite different. It turns out that states have long delegated some policy functions to private actors (the data cover 1902 to 2002), but on a small scale that has increased mostly proportionate to the rise in global governance itself. In the few instances when states do delegate such policy functions, it is usually for implementation and usually to be done with other actors. For example, private actors might be a last resort for adjudication among states, but states are given the opportunity to work out their differences directly first. A sampling of post-treaty documents, like protocols to conventions, finds higher rates of delegation there, although states still prefer to delegate to international institutions. Green calls this power sharing rather than a power shift, and notes that 60% of the delegation is for species management, with much of the rest being for similar technical roles.
Entrepreneurial private authority has a very different trajectory, “growing precipitously” but only in the last decade (p. 79). The data assembled here are really unprecedented, with Green identifying 119 currently active private transnational codes or standards of various kinds on the environment. Most of these have a strong technical component and appear to be in areas of minimal governance from international organizations. Perhaps the most surprising characteristic is that almost all of these types of private rules—corporate social governance is the exception—are “hard” rules in the sense of requiring third-party certification by additional private actors. Green also notes that a number of the codes have pieces of existing private standards embedded in them, and concludes that there is some convergence probably taking place among the systems of private governance, even as multiple instances continue to coexist in the same issue area.
From the larger databases of private authority, Green selects a prominent example of each for further analysis. Private authority in implementation of the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change exemplifies the dynamics of delegated authority; analysis of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (an initiative of the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development) does the same for entrepreneurial authority. These are well-executed case studies that show a typical version of the respective concepts, carried out through interviews and documentary analysis. They could be the major empirical contribution of many books, but are primarily illustrative of the quantitative chapters in this one.
Rethinking Private Authority scooped up both of the major environmental book awards in political science and related fields in 2015, the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association’s Environmental Studies Section and the Lynton Caldwell Prize of the American Political Science Association’s Science, Technology, and Environment Section. (In the interests of full disclosure, I chaired the Sprout Award committee that granted this prize.) It is an excellent, pathbreaking book. It also has limits, with the most important coming from the its focus on institutional origins.
As Green notes several times, little has been written about whether private governance schemes actually improve social and environmental outcomes (p. 84), and her book adds little to that discussion. In the most direct discussion of the topic here, in the conclusion, she argues that the more appropriate standard might be the governance output, or whether “private rules changed the behavior of other actors—which may or may not include states” (p. 172); she is also concerned with avoiding “normative pronouncements about the desirability of private authority” (p. 178). Yet in policy areas like environmental governance, the outcomes associated with particular institutions are a major focus. In the literature on environmental regimes, this is the distinction between political effectiveness—there is a rule and it is followed—and environmental effectiveness: Does the followed rule actually keep trees standing, reduce carbon emissions, and the like? Ultimately, that is a question that needs to be answered for private environmental governance.
This is itself in good part an empirical task, and Richard Locke’s recent analysis of whether similar private entrepreneurial standards actually create “a more just and safe working environment for millions of workers” (The Promise and Limits of Private Power: Promoting Labor Standards in a Global Economy, 2013, p. 3) provides a model for this kind of study (he is skeptical). Like many empirical questions, it is likely that some do and some do not. But the question of outcomes is not easily walled off from a question of origins, and the empirical answer might well require more reflection on just what kind of problem is being solved for whom in private environmental governance, especially in the cases of private entrepreneurial authority.
