When Private Governance Impedes Multilateralism: The Case of International Pesticide Governance

Private governance—the enactment of state-like governance functions by non-state actors—has come to challenge the role of the state in an increasingly complex global governance landscape. The rise of private standards has fueled debates over the role and effectiveness of private authority compared to public regulation. This debate relates to sustainability transitions, as the United Nations and other actors pushing for sustainability advocate leveraging private governance to this end.

When encouraging the development of private standards, national governments, intergovernmental organizations and civil society representatives that promote sustainability often explicitly or implicitly assume that such standards will complement public measures. Yet, research on relationships between public and private authority and the ways in which private standards help solve, or exacerbate, sustainability issues is relatively new.

A new journal article published in the journal of Regulation & Governance by Fiona Kinniburgh, Henrik Selin, Noelle E. Selin and Miranda Schreurs analyzes interactions between private standard-setting bodies and public policymaking fora. The authors focus on the case of international pesticide governance, a sustainability issue that is garnering greater public attention due to concerns about pesticide use on human health and ecosystems.

There are currently three main global chemicals treaties which govern hazardous pesticides: the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the 1998 Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade and the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). Both the Montreal Protocol and the Stockholm Convention ban the production, use and trade of pesticides listed under each respective treaty. In contrast, the Rotterdam Convention facilitates information sharing on the transnational shipment of pesticides through a “prior informed consent” (PIC) procedure, allowing parties to refuse imports of pesticides listed under the treaty. Global governance of hazardous pesticides is increasingly shaped by a combination of the implementation of these three main chemicals treaties and the growth of private voluntary agricultural standards. The authors analyze how the introduction and expansion of multiple private agricultural standards influence the implementation of global chemicals treaties addressing hazardous pesticides.

The authors find private agricultural standard-setting bodies use the Rotterdam Convention’s pesticide list to develop their own lists of banned substances. This alters the Rotterdam Convention’s intended role, impeding efforts to add substances to the treaty, as attempts by private actors to impose stricter governance than state actors can undermine the potential for international state-based governance to become more stringent. They characterize this as a “confounding interaction” whereby institutional linkages between actions by public and private actors with broadly aligned goals results in unexpected negative consequences for governance.