Tabling sustainable commodities through private governance

Abstract

Over the past few decades, new types of private governance arrangements arose which increasingly shape outcomes in global governance. The object of this dissertation is a specific form of private governance arrangement which emerged in the early 2000s in response to sustainability challenges regarding agricultural commodities: the so-called Roundtables. These Roundtables are global multi-stakeholder platforms that aim to promote and steer change of an entire agricultural commodity chain towards a more sustainable direction. Their decision-making processes include business actors from all links in a commodity chain, developmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and environmental NGOs, while state actors are formally excluded from these processes. Roundtables use certification as main instrument to ensure compliance with their regulation. The proliferation of private actors in governing issues regarding sustainable development has given rise to extensive academic and political debates. Many of these debates are related to what constitutes legitimate private governance. This dissertation therefore focusses on issues of legitimacy related to private governance arrangements. The vast majority of the academic literature focuses on democratic legitimacy related to private governance and uses a specific conception of legitimacy which makes the distinction between input and output legitimacy. The scope of such approaches is rather limited for three reasons. First, these approaches are normative and as a consequence hardly inform us about the different ways legitimacy might actually develop. Second, these approaches are originally state-oriented. Private governance arrangements, however, differ essentially from traditional state regulation. Third, evaluating arrangements on ‘rigid’ criteria presents a rather static approach. Therefore, this dissertation suggests an additional approach, which conceptualizes legitimacy as a relational and relative concept, rather than a normative yardstick to assess private governance arrangements. Legitimacy is a relational concept in the sense that it develops through the relationship between a governance arrangement and its relevant audiences. Legitimacy is a relative concept in the sense that the criteria of legitimacy change per historical and societal context. Therefore, it is conceived as constituted in a social process where phases of legitimization and de-legitimization can occur consecutively or in parallel. Consequently, this dissertation poses the following research question: How can processes of legitimization in private governance arrangements be analyzed and explained? The dissertation answers this question by means of four individual empirical analyses, which each shed light on a different aspect of legitimization processes. These analyses focus on two front-running arrangements in particular: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the Roundtable on Responsible Soy. These arrangements are studied using qualitative research methods allowing for in-depth analyses of different dimensions of their processes of legitimization. Based on the findings in the empirical chapters, the dissertation provides an enhanced conceptualization of legitimization processes of private governance arrangements and is able to contribute to several important debates in the literature