About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


14 Global Governance 387 (2008)
Private Institution and Business Power in Global Governance

handle is hein.journals/glogo14 and id is 395 raw text is: Global Governance 14 (2008), 387-403 REVIEW ESSAY Private Institutions and Business Power in Global Governance Morten Ougaard Graz, Jean-Christophe, and Andreas Nblke, eds., Transnational Private Gov- ernance and its Limits (London and New York: Routledge/ECPR Stud- ies in European Political Science, 2008). Fuchs, Doris. Business Power in Global Governance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007). Pattberg, Philipp H. Private Institutions and Global Governance. The New Politics of Environmental Sustainability (Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007). n research on globalization, global politics, and global governance, it is increasingly accepted that nonstate actors-business entities, civil soci- ety organizations, think tanks, and others-matter. It is also recognized that business actors, in particular transnational corporations and business associations, can have considerable influence. Furthermore, attention has been called to business's capacity to exert authority by itself, to private self-regulation of standard setting and codes of conduct, and to new public roles for the private sector exemplified by the widespread discourses on corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship. This debate is not new. Several of these themes were recognized and analyzed almost four decades ago under the heading of transnational rela- tions.] Many have also been a permanent concern for international politi- cal economiy (IPE) scholars such as Susan Strange2 and for neo-Gramscian and historical materialists.3 But during the years when the debates between realism, neorealism, liberal institutionalism, and, later, constructivism had captured center stage in international relations scholarship, these issues were not seen as central to the field. The books reviewed in this essay-along with several others4-testify to the fact that such themes are moving closer to center stage for research in international relations and global politics. This attention to nonstate actors in general and business in particular is not alone in what seems to be a general reorientation of the entire field. The attention to lower-level networks among states-the disaggregation of the state5-and to the relatively independent