Emerging Private Governance: The Challenges of Choosing a Policy Focus

Across sectors of the global economy, private governance has emerged as a new instrument for addressing pressing social and environmental problems. Although better suited for tackling the challenge of reaching agreements among states to address problems transcending national borders, these initiatives create new boundaries based on what problems they choose to focus on and which actors they choose to regulate – that is, the different policy foci of individual programs. Specialization is not inherently problematic. Private governance can focus attention on the problems of a single-issue area and build capacity among actors to resolve its problems, but equally a particular policy focus can create more problems than it fixes. Using certification systems, developed and run by non-state actors, from the forest, fisheries, and coffee sectors, this paper explores the reasons behind the different policy foci certification programs take on and how programs, alone and through coordinated efforts, seek to manage interactive and spillover effects arising from the issue-area boundaries that separate them. It closes with recommendations for future coordination strategies that draw from work in international relations and public administration

Emerging Private Governance: The Challenges of Choosing a Policy Focus

Across sectors of the global economy, private governance has emerged as a new instrument for addressing pressing social and environmental problems. Although better suited for tackling the challenge of reaching agreements among states to address problems transcending national borders, these initiatives create new boundaries based on what problems they choose to focus on and which actors they choose to regulate – that is, the different policy foci of individual programs. Specialization is not inherently problematic. Private governance can focus attention on the problems of a single-issue area and build capacity among actors to resolve its problems, but equally a particular policy focus can create more problems than it fixes. Using certification systems, developed and run by non-state actors, from the forest, fisheries, and coffee sectors, this paper explores the reasons behind the different policy foci certification programs take on and how programs, alone and through coordinated efforts, seek to manage interactive and spillover effects arising from the issue-area boundaries that separate them. It closes with recommendations for future coordination strategies that draw from work in international relations and public administration

Emerging Private Governance: The Challenges of Choosing a Policy Focus

Across sectors of the global economy, private governance has emerged as a new instrument for addressing pressing social and environmental problems. Although better suited for tackling the challenge of reaching agreements among states to address problems transcending national borders, these initiatives create new boundaries based on what problems they choose to focus on and which actors they choose to regulate – that is, the different policy foci of individual programs. Specialization is not inherently problematic. Private governance can focus attention on the problems of a single-issue area and build capacity among actors to resolve its problems, but equally a particular policy focus can create more problems than it fixes. Using certification systems, developed and run by non-state actors, from the forest, fisheries, and coffee sectors, this paper explores the reasons behind the different policy foci certification programs take on and how programs, alone and through coordinated efforts, seek to manage interactive and spillover effects arising from the issue-area boundaries that separate them. It closes with recommendations for future coordination strategies that draw from work in international relations and public administration

Micro-Level Interactions in the Compliance Processes of Transnational Private Governance

Transnational private governance has emerged in multiple issue areas to promote responsible business practices. While most studies assess its rule-setting function, much less research has been done on the compliance-assessment function. This chapter examines the various actors that are involved in this process—auditors, individual assessors and, to a lesser extent, accreditors—and their respective interactions. Using the Marine Stewardship Council as an empirical case, the chapter examines the level of competition among accredited auditors and assessors, and the degree of organizational interdependence. It argues that while the number of accredited auditors has increased over time, the degree of competition is rather limited, while auditors are also much less operationally independent than expected due to the mobility of assessors across auditors. As such, this chapter contributes to the TBGI literature by providing a micro-level perspective addressing interactions among governance actors within a transnational private governance regime and their potential influence on regime effectiveness

Unbundling the Regime Complex: The Effects of Private Authority

There is a commonly held view that forms of private regulation and governance arise when intergovernmental cooperation fails. While we do not dispute that this is sometimes the case, this paper focuses on the longer-term effects of private authority – namely, the ways that public and private authority interact over time. We argue that a more complete understanding of regime complexity must include private authority, which we define as situations in which non-state actors make rules or set standards that other actors in world politics adopt, and its interactions with public authority. Interactions among public and private actors occur in two ways – one static and one dynamic. We show how each of these interactions affects the overall “design” of the regime complex and its evolution over time. To explore these two arguments, we propose an “unbundling” of the regime complex, to trace the specific mechanisms through which public and private authority co-exist and interact. We argue that private authority is not merely a response to gaps in public authority, rather, we explore the possibility that private authority can address the political and institutional constraints present in public authority. We argue that private authority can provide functional improvements to existing regime complexes by helping to overcome path dependencies that public authority may face. We describe three specific mechanisms through which this might occur: by providing a redefinition of the problem, supplying a “repository” where different policy approaches can exist until their time becomes “ripe”, or serving as an additional means through which to diffuse public authority

Unbundling the Regime Complex: The Effects of Private Authority

There is a commonly held view that forms of private regulation and governance arise when intergovernmental cooperation fails. While we do not dispute that this is sometimes the case, this paper focuses on the longer-term effects of private authority – namely, the ways that public and private authority interact over time. We argue that a more complete understanding of regime complexity must include private authority, which we define as situations in which non-state actors make rules or set standards that other actors in world politics adopt, and its interactions with public authority. Interactions among public and private actors occur in two ways – one static and one dynamic. We show how each of these interactions affects the overall “design” of the regime complex and its evolution over time. To explore these two arguments, we propose an “unbundling” of the regime complex, to trace the specific mechanisms through which public and private authority co-exist and interact. We argue that private authority is not merely a response to gaps in public authority, rather, we explore the possibility that private authority can address the political and institutional constraints present in public authority. We argue that private authority can provide functional improvements to existing regime complexes by helping to overcome path dependencies that public authority may face. We describe three specific mechanisms through which this might occur: by providing a redefinition of the problem, supplying a “repository” where different policy approaches can exist until their time becomes “ripe”, or serving as an additional means through which to diffuse public authority

Unbundling the Regime Complex: The Effects of Private Authority

There is a commonly held view that forms of private regulation and governance arise when intergovernmental cooperation fails. While we do not dispute that this is sometimes the case, this paper focuses on the longer-term effects of private authority—namely, the ways that public and private authority interact over time. We argue that a more complete understanding of regime complexity must include private authority, which we define as situations in which non-state actors make rules or set standards that other actors in world politics adopt, and its interactions with public authority. Interactions among public and private actors occur in two ways—one static and one dynamic. We show how each of these interactions affects the overall design of the regime complex and its evolution over time. To explore these two arguments, we propose an unbundling of the regime complex, to trace the specific mechanism through which public and private authority co-exist and interact. We argue that private authority is not merely a response to gaps in public authority; rather, we explore the possibility that private authority can address the political and institutional constraints present in public authority. We argue that private authority can provide functional improvements to existing regime complexes by helping to overcome path dependencies that public authority may face. We describe three specific mechanisms through which this might occur: by providing a redefinition of the problem, supplying a repository where different policy approaches can exist until their time becomes ripe , or serving as an additional means through which to diffuse public authority

Statistical modelling of environmental extremes

This thesis is concerned with the development of theory and statistical methodologies that may be used to analyse environmental extremes. As extreme environmental events are often associated with large economic costs and loss of human life, accurate statistical modelling of such events is crucial in order to be able to accurately estimate their frequency and intensity. A key feature of environmental time series is that they display serial correlation which must be modelled in order for valid inferences to be drawn. One line of research in this thesis is the development of flexible time series models that may be used to simulate the behaviour of an environmental process after entering an extreme state. This allows us to estimate quantities such as the mean duration of an extreme event. We illustrate our modelling approach and methodology by simulating the behaviour of daily maximum temperature in Orleans, France, over a three week period given that the temperature exceeds 35C at the start of the period. Much of extreme value theory for time series has been developed under the assumption of strict stationarity, a mathematically convenient but often unrealistic assumption for environmental data. Our second project extends some well known classical results for strictly stationary time series to a more general setting that allows for non-stationarity. We show that for weakly dependent time series with common marginal distributions, the distribution of the sample maximum at large thresholds is characterized by a parameter that plays an analogous role to the extremal index of a stationary time series, and may be estimated similarly. Our results are applied to the particular case where non-stationarity arises through periodicity in the dependence structure as may be expected in certain environmental time series. We also show how our results may be further generalized to allow for different marginal distributions. Another strand of research in this thesis concerns the detection and quantification of changes in the distribution of the annual maximum daily maximum temperature (TXx) in a large gridded data set of European daily temperature during the years 1950-2018. We model TXx throughout Europe using a generalized extreme value distribution, with the log of the atmospheric concentration of CO2 as a covariate. It is commonplace in the geoscientific literature for such models to be fit separately at each spatial location over the domain of interest. To reflect the fact that nearby locations are expected to be similarly affected by any climate change, we instead consider models that incorporate spatial dependence, and thus increase efficiency in parameter estimation compared to separate model fits. We find strong evidence for shifts towards hotter temperatures throughout Europe. Averaged across our spatial domain, the 100-year return temperature based on the 2018 climate is approximately 2C hotter than that based on the 1950 climate. Our final project concerns the evaluation of bias in climate model output and how such biases contribute to biases in hazard indices. Based on copula theory we develop a multivariate bias-assessment framework, which allows us to disentangle the biases in hazard indicators in terms of biases in the underlying univariate drivers and their statistical dependence. Based on this framework, we dissect biases in fire and heat stress hazards in a set of global climate models by considering two simplified hazard indicators: the wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) and the Chandler burning index (CBI)

Guest Editorial

Includes a brief account of the correspondence in Norman Porteous’ papers, which were presented to New College Library, University of Edinburgh