Corporations at a crossroads: How multilevel governance interactions shape participation and effort in private governance regimes

Abstract

This article argues that the interactions between firm agency in corporate management and the multilevel governance structures in which firms operate condition firms' participation and effort in private governance regimes. Empirically, I examine the Fortune Global 500 firms' decisions about participation and the extent of participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project during 2011–2015. Given firms' strategic considerations, the efficacy of corporate management structures and practices is conditioned by domestic regulatory and global regime contexts, and this efficacy varies across developed and developing countries. In developed countries, corporate, domestic, and global governance positively reinforce each other as drivers of private regulation on climate change. These governance levels are complements not substitutes. By contrast, the main drivers of participation and effort in developing countries are corporate management structures and practices, the stringency of domestic regulatory institutions, and their interactions. This article's results are robust to alternative specifications, including an alternative modeling approach.

Can campaign‐style enforcement work: When and how? Evidence from straw burning control in China

“…The success of the straw burning control campaigns, particularly their long‐term and positive spillover impacts, offers an important alternative for enhancing the enforcement of environmental laws and regulations in China and other developing countries. Some scholars have proposed that weak governance capacity in developing countries is one of the major challenges to their effectiveness in undertaking environmental protection (Hsueh, 2019). For developing countries, it takes time to improve governance capacity by strengthening formal institutions and enforcement structure.…”

Help your neighbor, help yourself: The drivers of European Union's climate cooperation in trans‐governmental networks with its neighbors

“…First, there is an increasing demand for knowledge and expertise‐sharing on global challenges requiring a coordinated response, such as on climate governance (e.g., Miller, 2007). Second, sharing best practices and policy‐relevant insights can improve the governance of complex issues at different levels (Hsueh, 2019; Shyrokykh, 2019; Wagner et al, 2020). In contrast to coercive and hierarchical governance via conditionality, trans‐governmental networks permit flexibility in the extent and areas of cooperation, as well as the pace of transformation.…”

Country‐Specific Participation Patterns in Transnational Governance Initiatives on Sustainability: Preliminary Insights and Research Agenda

“…Another expectation that requires further attention refers to the economic sectors of the companies, as these can have important implications for their decision to engage in TGIs on sustainability. [29,69] Overall, our overarching argument about the existence of cross-country variation in the TGI participation was confirmed. This was the main point we sought to convey.…”

“…[28] Concentrating on firms' decisions on whether to participate in TGIs, Hsueh stresses the importance of domestic regulatory contexts, which condition the business actors' strategic considerations. [29] When shifting focus to civil society organizations and the domestic conditions for their participation in TGIs, research has stressed the possibilities of "venue shopping" [52,53] and "forum shopping" [24] offered by the multilevel [54][55][56] or polycentric [10,11,57,58] nature of the governance landscape. According to the concepts of multilevel and polycentric governance (for a discussion, see ref.…”

“…However, our analysis also offers insights that could help to explain whether and to what extent engagement in TGIs on sustainability has implica-tions for domestic sustainability governance, as this would resonate with the basic tenet of multilevel governance. [29,[54][55][56]58] As Table 3 shows, there is variation across countries and TGIs as to whether only one, two, or all three types of organizations participate in them. The variation observed aligns with our reasoning that TGIs provide opportunity structures which are accessible to all three types of organizations, but that the decision of whether to engage is ultimately up to the organization.…”