Contemporary global politics is characterized by an increasing trend toward experimental forms of governance, with an emphasis on private governance. A plurality of private standards, codes of conduct and quality assurance schemes currently developed particularly, though not exclusively, by TNCs replace traditional intergovernmental regimes in addressing profound global environmental and socio-economic challenges ranging from forest deforestation, fisheries depletion, climate change, to labor and human rights concerns. While this trend has produced a heated debate in science and politics, surprisingly little attention (...) has been paid on the effects of private governance on questions of distribution and justice. This is highly problematic. At the beginning of the twenty-first century global inequalities are greater than ever before, while rapid economic, social, political, and environmental changes threaten to further derail sustainable development and humanitarian objectives. If private governance creates or intensifies some of the pressing global inequalities (e.g., food security), and alleviates others (e.g., environmental degradation), from a business ethics perspective, we need to know which aspects need to be strengthened and where appropriate interventions are necessary and desirable. This paper proposes a framework to examine and classify the distributive outcomes of private governance institutions through the lenses of one particular approach to distributive justice, the capability approach. Empirically, it focuses on agrifood one area where the controversy regarding the distributive concerns of private governance are particularly pronounced. (shrink)

Stewardship—the caring for fellow human beings as well as the nonhuman world—is receiving increasing attention from scholars in the field of global environmental change. Recent publications underscore that stewardship is becoming a key norm within the global international system of states, but that in remaining state-centric, stewardship fails to create a deeper systemic transformation of the international system’s normative structure. In this article, we examine whether stewardship also underpins hybrid governance arrangements, which are a combination of public requirements and private (...) standards, with a specific emphasis on certification. We argue that a stewardship ethos requires citizenship, compassion and sufficiency. We, thus, contribute to the burgeoning literature on certification by focusing on normative principles that are fundamental for sustainability governance, but have so far been neglected in governance research. Empirically, we are able to reveal broader implications of the normative transformations underway in global sustainability governance. To add depth to our analysis, we concentrate on palm oil, an agricultural commodity, which serves for food purposes and as a substitute for fossil fuels to mitigate global warming. Palm oil is representative of the interlinkages between social and environmental objectives, which are at the core of the notion of stewardship as conceptualized in this article. We find that stewardship underpins hybrid governance arrangements but momentarily it is realized only in niches. We argue that in order to move to a state of global stewardship, we need a bolder public policy agenda which respects environmental limits, acknowledges boundaries for the global poor, and allows for the expression of emotions in public dialogue. (shrink)

This commentary on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Climate of History initially frames the work in the context of the ongoing transdisciplinary project of creating synergies or more precisely “consilience” between the sciences and humanities. When this project is engaged in on the premises of the humanities (and the social sciences), we end up with the Earth system and the planetary as the basic lifeblood of human society—what foregrounds existence in common. That this realization is already bringing forth new justificatory principles for governance (...) in a planetary age is then related through a history of ecological justice concerns. (shrink)

Democratic legitimacy is rarely associated with private governance. After all, private actors are not legitimized through elections by a demos. Instead of abandoning democratic principles when entering the private sphere of governance, however, this article argues in favour of employing alternative criteria of democracy in assessments. Specifically, this article uses the criteria of participation, transparency and accountability to evaluate the democratic legitimacy of private food retail governance institutions. It pursues this evaluation of the democratic legitimacy of these institutions against the (...) background of their ambivalent impact on the sustainability of the global agrifood system. The paper refers to a range of cases of private retail standards with different governance structures and substantial foci to illustrate its argument. (shrink)