Protect, Respect, Remedy and Participate: ‘New Governance’ Lessons for the Ruggie Framework
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Description
Published as Chapter 12 in The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Foundations and Implementation, Radu Mares, ed.
This piece addresses the legacy of Harvard Professor John Gerard Ruggie’s work as the first UN Special Representative to the Secretary General (SRSG) on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations, a UN mandate he held from 2005-2011. In it, we interrogate the theoretical underpinnings of the conceptual and policy framework for addressing human rights abuse in the business context that Professor Ruggie has endorsed as SRSG and query whether a conceptually and operationally more effective framework might have been produced had Ruggie and his team approached the task from a new governance or new accountability perspective.
After situating Ruggie’s work within a sociological institutionalist perspective to system transformation, we describe the key insights offered by new governance approaches for the construction of effective governance and accountability regimes – including those of expanded stakeholder participation, the addition of new kinds of non-traditional processes for holding social actors to account, and the role of orchestration in promoting learning and experimentation across sectors and individual governance entities. Taking these insights into account, we conclude that Ruggie’s “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” framework would have been significantly strengthened by the addition of a fourth “Participation” pillar. That pillar would have acknowledged the critical role that civil society actors play at all levels of global governance today and, importantly, provided a firm normative foundation for such actors to insist on direct participation in the monitoring, enforcement, and implementation of the diverse array of policies and practices that affect the enjoyment of human rights in the business context.
Publication Date
2011
Publisher
Martinus Nijhoff
City
Leiden
ISBN
9789004210516
First Page
303
Keywords
human rights, business, new governance, accountability, participation, orchestration, sociological institutionalism, acculturation
Disciplines
Human Rights Law | Law | Transnational Law
Recommended Citation
Tara J. Melish & Errol Meidinger, Protect, Respect, Remedy and Participate: ‘New Governance’ Lessons for the Ruggie Framework in The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Foundations and Implementation 303 (Radu Mares, ed., Martinus Nijhoff 2011)
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