Private Governance and the Pursuit of Justice. A Critical Discourse Analysis on the differing Justice Concepts of Private Sustainability Standard Initiatives

Abstract

This thesis is based on the notion that private sustainability standards as an important instrument within transnational governance hold a crucial role in achieving global justice. A common aim of sustainability standard initiatives is to address justice issues inherent of current global production and consumption structures and to benefit Southern producers. However, initiatives face critique, which accuses them of reinforcing injustices they originally wanted to address. While scientific research has paid attention to both global justice and private governance institutions, the intersection of these topics has undergone little profound scientific analysis. Particularly little is known about how private sustainability standard initiatives frame justice, although these conceptualizations shape the content of a standard, relations among supply chain actors and thus ultimately global trade. Accordingly, the research objective of this thesis was to reveal how private sustainability standard initiatives frame justice, and to find potential explanations for these framings. Five initiatives were chosen for analysis: Fairtrade International, Rainforest Alliance/Sustainable Agriculture Network (RA/SAN), UTZ, Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP) and GLOBALG.A.P. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) was applied to disclose the initiatives’ understandings of justice. The research made use of the justice framework suggested by Biermann & Kalfagianni, which suggests core justice statements relating to the philosophical traditions of liberal egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, capabilities approach, libertarianism and critical perspectives. The framework has been extended to utilitarianism. Core justice statements comprise subjects, principles and mechanisms of justice and serve as analytical categories. A content analysis of publications was complemented by a questionnaire and interviews of representatives of the initiatives. Findings indicate the presence of all justice theories in the initiatives’ justice framings. Especially the capabilities approach was present in all cases, since the initiatives promote capacity building for ruletakers to assist them on their way to certification. Fairtrade and RA/SAN, predominantly governed by NGOs and Southern stakeholders, tend to promote a rather transformational idea of justice, while GLOBALG.A.P. and ETP, dominated by corporate, Northern interests, tend to support more conventional, non-transformative ideas of justice. For UTZ, results are most mixed, which can be related to its diverse stakeholder composition. CDA revealed hegemonic struggles between NGOs, Southern stakeholders and corporate actors, who use the initiatives to pursue their respective interests. It is recommended, that standard initiatives include diverse stakeholders in decision-making, especially Southern rule-takers, to overcome paternalism, prevent domination of vested interests and to find viable solutions for the justice issues of global trade.