Public and private governance in Business and Human Rights: A dynamic model of mutual influences

The last three decades have heralded a rise of private governance schemes and a respective transformation of traditional state-centered global governance. In this conceptual paper, we show that private governance and state-led governance are neither substitutes nor complements to each other. We frame their relation to each other as a dynamic process of mutual interaction, influence, and stimulation, which changes in form and direction along the different stages of the regulatory process. We illustrate how the (co-)existence and/or combination of private and state-led governance alters the mode of operation, focus, processes, and outlook of each of them. For the development of our framework, we focus on private and state-led governance approaches in the business and human rights domain. The paper contributes to the literature on global governance by conceptualizing the relationship between private and public governance as more dynamic and mutually reinforcing than currently discussed in the literature.