No abstract

Systems of private regulation based on certification have recently emerged to address environmental issues in the forest products industry and labor issues in the apparel industry. To explain why the same regulatory form has emerged across these fields, the author uses a historical and comparative case study approach, closely examining early moments and paying attention to "roads not taken." Two types of factors led to the initial emergence of private certification: (1) social movement campaigns targeting companies and (2) a neo-liberal institutional context. The analysis shows specific ways in which these factors led states, nongovernmental organizations, and companies to build or support certification associations.Recent decades have seen dramatic shifts in the regulation of industries away from traditional "command and control" strategies-based on fixed standards enforced by the state-and toward regulatory forms based on different social control strategies-like market mechanisms, the provision of information, and infor-For comments and discussions on earlier incarnations of this article, I thank

No abstract

This article assesses three approaches to state regulation: capture theory, interest group analyses, and neoinstitutional research. Statelevel event history analyses of fire insurance rate regulation from 1906 to 1930 are used. Contrary to capture theory, regulation was not driven simply by firms' interests in market control. Instead, consistent with interest group analyses, regulation was more likely when anticompany forces-farmers and small businesses-could challenge big business politically. Further, as neoinstitutional research suggests, regulation was more likely when industry governance evoked legitimacy crises, when courts and professions endorsed regulation and its underlying models, and when states developed system-wide administrative capacities. Institutional conditions also mediated the effects of markets and politics on regulation. Using these findings, we develop a theory of how political and institutional conditions shape industries' governance options.

After two decades in which transnational governance of production processes has typically meant voluntary subscription to privately developed standards, some transnational rulemaking projects are promoting mandatory compliance with law. The emerging timber legality regime is one example of this, and scholars' efforts to theorize this regime have produced provocative new analyses of interactions between public and private standards. Recent analyses, including those in this issue, predict that the new legality regime will bolster voluntary initiatives that certify sustainable forests. Based on research in Indonesia and China, I argue that this prediction is questionable and that the rise of the timber legality regime could constrict, rather than expand the space for global private authority. Further, I argue that it would not be entirely a bad thing if the legality regime overtook sustainability certification. Behind these specific arguments are general perspectives on how domestic circumstances shape transnational business governance and on the role of states in pluralistic fields of governance -both issues that are obscured by more architectural approaches.