Seemingly Connected, Obviously Separate: The Parallel Realities of the UN Global Compact and the Multilateral Regimes in Water Governance

Gor Samvel
Additional contact information
Gor Samvel: International Law Department, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva-14456, Switzerland

Laws, 2018, vol. 7, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: The UN Global Compact, being an institutional innovation in global governance, invites businesses to voluntarily commit to a selection of principles, rooted in multilateral regimes. Such commitment is expected to improve business practices and by that to close gaps in global governance. This spawns an expectation that through UN Global Compact business and multilateral treaty regimes will engage in mutually fertilizing and potentially coherent interaction to overcome the shortfalls of global governance. The current paper looks into this alleged interaction in the field of water stewardship and access to water. It explores first, the conceptual interdependence of the UN Global Compact and multilateral regimes in the respective fields and second, the ways in which the business practices reported under the UN Global Compact contribute to the advancement of the rules and principles thereof. The paper finds that the traditional multilateral systems and the innovative governance platform share an identical conceptual narrative but exist as separate realities on operational level. From the latter perspective the UN Global Compact might risk deepening governance gaps rather than close them.

Keywords: Global Compact; United Nations; non-state actors; water governance; human right to water; international water law; international water governance; international regimes; human rights obligations of private actors; business and human rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 E61 E62 F13 F42 F68 K0 K1 K2 K3 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/7/4/37/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/7/4/37/ (text/html)

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:gam:jlawss:v:7:y:2018:i:4:p:37-:d:180546

Access Statistics for this article

Laws is currently edited by Ms. Heather Liang

More articles in Laws from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().