Contested coexistence: transnational private governance and public regulatory reform in global value chains

Pauline Jerrentrup and Jade Kosche

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This article examines how a transnational coalition of NGOs, unions, and labor rights organizations drove both privateand public regulation on gender-based violence and harassment in Lesotho's garment sector, and how the resulting regula-tory systems coexist despite ongoing tension between them. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, stakeholderinterviews, and archival analysis, we show that the coalition leveraged reputational and diplomatic pressures, enabled by Lesotho's structural dependence on the United States as both buyer and donor, to secure the Lesotho Agreement and subsequent public regulatory reforms. The same dependencies that enabled these reforms also generated sustained tensions once the regulatory systems were in place. We term this dynamic contested coexistence—a governance configuration in which a supplying country's structural dependence on a buyer country forecloses rejection of a private regulatory system while constraining open endorsement of it—and identify it as a new form of private-public interaction within Cashore et al.'s framework.

Keywords: gender-based violence; global value chains; labor governance; public-private governance; transnational private governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F16 J83 J88 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg
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Published in Regulation and Governance, 24, September, 2026. ISSN: 1748-5983

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