ABSTRACT
The interest in organizations as a field of study within International Relations (IR) and environmental politics has resurged in recent years. However, a distinct class of organizations has been frequently overlooked in debates about the nature of global environmental governance: private organizations that do not predominantly direct their behaviour towards public actors but rather devise and implement a range of standards and regulations targeting other private actors. This empirical observation is situated within the larger context of the ongoing debate about a profound shift in global environmental governance. State-centred approaches to problem-solving are increasingly complemented by novel institutional arrangements such as public policy networks and private forms of co-regulation between NGOs and companies. These new forms of global environmental policy-making emerge at the intersection of two broader trends in world politics. First, there is the ‘privatization of regulation’, a transfer of regulatory tasks from public actors such as states and intergovernmental organizations to a wide range of non-state actors such as bond-rating agencies or the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The second observable trend refers to the, real or perceived, transformation of confrontation to cooperation as the primary mode of interaction between divergent actors in world politics. In this context, partnership has been heralded as the new paradigm to overcome conflicts of interests in many different areas, from implementing international agreements (Hale and Mauzerall 2004) to securing environmental and social responsibility of corporations through rules and standards (Ruggie 2002).
