Community structure and the behavior of transnational sustainability governors: Toward a multi‐relational approach

Luc Fransen, Jelmer Schalk and Graeme Auld

Regulation & Governance, 2020, vol. 14, issue 1, 3-25

Abstract: Hundreds of transnational private governance organizations (TPGOs) have emerged in recent decades to govern social and environmental conditions of production using voluntary standards. A debate persists over whether the ties among different TPGOs and other organizations create a professional community that affects the behavior of TPGOs. To help resolve this debate, we analyze multiple ties among agriculture TPGOs to offer a more robust exploration of community structures and their potential effects for three forms of TPGO behavior – coordination, collaboration, and isomorphism. Our aggregate measure of ties reveals a thin community dominated by older TPGOs and TPGOs advancing a broad notion of sustainability that were created by Solidaridad, the World Wildlife Fund, and/or Unilever. The clearest community structures are built from ties that exhibit the potential for not actual collaboration, coordination, and isomorphism. Thus, while there exists convergence toward an emergent TPGO‐community, obstacles remain to more intense behavioral effects for TPGOs.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12185

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:reggov:v:14:y:2020:i:1:p:3-25

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Regulation & Governance from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().