Addressing the Global Sustainability Challenge: The Potential and Pitfalls of Private Governance from the Perspective of Human Capabilities

Contemporary global politics is characterized
by an increasing trend toward experimental forms of governance,
with an emphasis on private governance. A plurality
of private standards, codes of conduct and quality
assurance schemes currently developed particularly,
though not exclusively, by TNCs replace traditional intergovernmental
regimes in addressing profound global
environmental and socio-economic challenges ranging
from forest deforestation, fisheries depletion, climate
change, to labor and human rights concerns. While this
trend has produced a heated debate in science and politics,
surprisingly little attention has been paid on the effects of
private governance on questions of distribution and justice.
This is highly problematic. At the beginning of the twentyfirst
century global inequalities are greater than ever
before, while rapid economic, social, political, and environmental
changes threaten to further derail sustainable
development and humanitarian objectives. If private governance
creates or intensifies some of the pressing global
inequalities (e.g., food security), and alleviates others (e.g.,
environmental degradation), from a business ethics perspective,
we need to know which aspects need to be
strengthened and where appropriate interventions are necessary
and desirable. This paper proposes a framework to
examine and classify the distributive outcomes of private
governance institutions through the lenses of one particular
approach to distributive justice, the capability approach.
Empirically, it focuses on agrifood one area where the
controversy regarding the distributive concerns of private
governance are particularly pronounced.