Introduction: Corporate Norm-entrepreneurship and Global Governance

Effective and legitimate governance beyond the state faces considerable challenges. The traditional mode of interstate accords seems increasingly insufficient to provide reliable and sustainable solutions to collective problems at the global level. Against this background, emerging new forms of private self-regulation may be seen as possible solutions. To establish how far these expectations are justified and to what extent private contributions to global governance can be supplements or even substitutes for public regulation, the aims are as follows: to take stock, in empirical terms, of private contributions to transnational governance systematically as an expression of the new interplay among the state, the business sector, and civil society; to understand better the potential as well as the limits of private regulatory initiatives as components of the future global governance architecture; investigate under what conditions what kind of private contributions to governance beyond the state can be expected; and to evaluate, from a normative perspective, the implications of these contributions for the effectiveness, responsiveness, and reliability of public good provision as well as for power control and the self-determination of the addressees of private regulatory initiatives. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.