Just Business by John Gerard Ruggie

Author:John Gerard Ruggie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Chapter Four

STRATEGIC PATHS

My mandate began modestly with the initial task of “identifying and clarifying” things, amid contentious debates and deep divisions reflecting the different interests and preferences of the major players: states, businesses, and civil society. It ended six years later with unanimous Human Rights Council endorsement and widespread uptake of what essentially is a soft-law instrument that enjoys strong support from them all. There was no script, no user’s manual, to follow because there had never been a UN mandate like it. So how did we get from there to here? And what if any lessons can be drawn from my particular journey for other efforts to narrow governance gaps created by globalization?

Every case has unique features, and this one is no exception. It may not be possible—or necessary—for future initiatives of this kind to travel along the specific paths I did. Nevertheless, retracing them may provide signposts for others and help separate out the idiosyncratic factors from more general features of how international norms are established and get disseminated and acted upon. This chapter outlines six strategic paths I identified and followed. I conclude by locating the Guiding Principles in a more general discussion of how new norms emerge and displace competing norms; how they cascade through rapid uptake; and, if successful, how they then are internalized by relevant actors and begin to assume a “taken-for-granted quality”—the ultimate measure of successful normative change.1

The six strategic paths comprised the following:

1. creating a minimum common knowledge base that permits a shared conversation to take place;

2. ensuring the legitimacy of the mandate process, quite apart from questions of substance;

3. bringing new players to the table whose insights and influence could advance the agenda;

4. road testing core proposals to demonstrate that they actually can work on the ground;

5. having an end-game strategy and effective political leadership to execute it; and where the opportunities exist or can be created,

6. working toward convergence among standard-setting bodies in order to achieve scale and benefit from the broadest possible portfolio of implementing mechanisms.

I. CREATING A COMMON KNOWLEDGE BASE

When I began in 2005, there was relatively little that counted as shared understanding regarding business and human rights among the major stakeholder groups involved in UN norm setting. There being no authoritative repository of information concerning corporate-related human rights abuse, anecdotal evidence ruled, coupled with evidentiary fragments from Alien Tort Statute cases, less than a handful of which had ever gone beyond procedural questions to address the actual merits of a case. Debates tended to be doctrinal, and doctrinal preferences tended to reflect institutional interests: business stressed its positive contributions to the realization of human rights coupled with the rapid growth of voluntary initiatives, while activist groups focused on the worst abuses and, with some of their academic supporters, demanded that some overarching global system of corporate liability be established. Since my initial mandate required me to “identify and clarify” the existing state of play, as a first step I conducted a set of baseline studies which I

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