Stockholm Center for International Law and Justice invites you to a seminar with:
Dr. Stepan Wood
Interactive Strategies for Advancing Marginalized Actors in Transnational Governance Contests: Labour and the Making of ISO 26000
This talk explores the role of organized labour in drafting the ISO 26000 Social Responsibility guidance standard as a case study of the circumstances in which weaker actors can take advantage of transnational business governance interactions (TBGIs) to achieve regulatory outcomes that advance their interests. I argue that organized labour was unlikely on its own to secure the International Organization for Standardization’s acquiescence to its legitimation demands, but succeeded by both proactively leveraging and passively riding on the delicate relationship between ISO, which lacked legitimacy and expertise to set social responsibility norms, and the International Labour Organization, which enjoyed both legitimacy and expertise in this field. I theorize a triadic strategy in which a regulatory underdog exploits legitimation differentials between a legitimacy-poor regulator and a legitimacy-rich booster to advance its interests, and the booster is doubly enrolled by both the regulator (to enhance the regulator’s legitimacy) and the underdog (to boost the underdog’s effectiveness). This analysis advances understanding of the interactive dynamics of legitimation and enrolment in transnational regulatory governance.
Professor Stepan Wood holds the Canada Research Chair in Law, Society & Sustainability and is Director of the Centre for Law & the Environment at the Peter A Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. Canada. Information about his Transnational Business Governance Interactions research project is available at www.tgiforum.org. He writes on environmental law, transnational law, regulatory governance, climate change law, sustainability, social responsibility and voluntary standards.
Registration (voluntary): scilj@juridicum.su.se, by 7th of December2018
This event has been made possible by support from the Edvard Cassel Foundation.