Trust and Global Governance. Ensuring Trustworthiness of Transnational Private Regulators

Public authority has been increasingly engaging with private actors for the purpose of regulating transnationally social and environmental responsibility of global production. ‘Orchestration' of private actors takes place under limited influence and control over the regulatory effects of private authority. This may lead to the problem of public authority legitimising and indirectly reinforcing forms of authority structurally dominated by specific private interests. This contribution adopts a perspective based on the concept of institutional trust to frame the interaction between public and private authority, and between private authorities and those affected by it. The paper uses the interplay between public regulators on the one hand, and voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) and companies implementing human rights due diligence (HRDD) on the other to illustrate how the relation between different forms of authority unfolds and the effects of this relation on those affected by private rules. It evaluates these two types of interplay against a framework based on the concept of institutional trust. It concludes by setting forth suggestions for the employment of private forms of authority by public actors in transnational regulation of global value chains