Transnational private environmental regulation: are states striking back?

Rapid global trade expansion in the 1990s spawned a parallel expansion in non-state (‘private’) environmental regulatory (PER) programmes. They issue standards, monitor and judge performance, sanction poor performance, and sometimes regulate state activities. PER programmes constitute extensive and complex transnational governance agglomerations encompassing environmental certification, corporate social responsibility, and environment-society-governance programmes, typically intertwined with governmental and intergovernmental regulatory programmes. Forestry and climate change examples are drawn on in this chapter, which analyses key features of PER programmes, how they may be growing empirically more binding despite their formally voluntary status and their changing relationships with governments. It finds that PER's pull on behaviour appears to be growing but is subject to new political headwinds. The EU is moving to conscript PER to its regulatory purposes while the United States remains conflicted and China manages it in a controlled way. Most other countries either passively accept or modestly deploy PER programmes for their policy goals.