You are hereby cordially invited to the MSc thesis presentation by Debbie Schepers on 'Minding the Gaps in the ‘Governance Gap-Debate’: an institutionalist analysis of National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights across seven countries'.
Supervisor: Otto Hospes
Examinor: Katrien Termeer
Date: 25.4.2023
Time: 15-16.00 hours CET
Location: hybrid; room 3029, Leeuwenborch
MS Teams link: Click here to join the meeting
Title: Minding the Gaps in the ‘Governance Gap-Debate’: an institutionalist analysis of National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights across seven countries.
AbstractIn 2011, the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (hereafter UNGPs) were adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in an attempt to overcome the governance gap in relation to transnational corporations (hereafter TNCs) (United Nations, 2011; Ruggie, 2013). With their call upon national governments to introduce National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights (hereafter NAPs BHR) made up of both voluntary and mandatory policy measures, the UNGPs are said to have brought discussions and policies on responsible business conduct into the arena of state oversight (e.g., Ramasastry, 2015; Wolfstellar and Li, 2022). However, a contemporary stocktaking and analysis of the policy measures proposed in NAPs BHR is currently omitted. This research addresses the knowledge gap on NAPs BHR policies by analysing the extent to which NAPs BHR portray a shift towards binding regulations on (transnational) responsible business conduct (hereafter RBC) For this purpose, the NAPs BHR of seven countries are analysed, namely: Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Kenya, The Netherlands, Pakistan and Uganda. For the cases of The Netherlands and Kenya, the document analysis is supplement by 9 semi-structured interviews with policymakers that played a key role in the NAP BHR deliberations to indicate what factors contribute to the adoption of binding RBC policies.
Using an institutionalist analytical framework (Scott, 1995), this research identifies several gaps in the governance debate that has been central to the scholarships on private sector governance over the past decade. On an empirical level, the results indicate that NAPs BHR mostly comprise voluntary measures and so it is premature to speak of a shift to binding regulation. That is not to say, however, that NAPs BHR do not contribute positively to the realisation of foreign corporate accountability. Voluntary measures that raise awareness on RBC issues and build stakeholder capacity to address them are ostensible prerequisites for any legal intervention to be successful. These insights point to a gap on a theoretical level: the conceptualisation of private sector governance regimes as narrow, legal relationships between the market and state leaves a gap in our understanding of the way private sector governance mechanisms play out in praxis. My research shows how the adoption of institutional theory into the scholarship on private sector governance can fill this gap. It illustrates how careful scrutiny of the interlinkages between regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pressures generate an advanced understanding of what factors lead to more stringent private sector governance regimes. It will be up to future policymakers as well as academics working in the field of RBC to establish methods through which the small steps away from voluntary RBC can be culminated into sustainable market transformation to overcome the governance gap related to powerful transnational corporations (Termeer and Dewulf, 2022).