How do Transnational Private Regulations Emerge? A Causal Process Tracing Study on the Open Contracting Partnership
Open AccessThe phenomenon of transnational private regulations (TPRs) has attracted significant scholarly attention recently. Private actors are increasingly moving away from purely serving as policy influencers to becoming policy makers, which as a result has transformed the traditional concepts of governance and authority. The emergence of privately created rules across borders has been studied disparately, and not much has been done to understand the relationships between various forces in an integrated manner. This dissertation disentangles the conceptual complexity embedded in TPRs and contributes to the growing body of literature that “stretches” and adapts existing public policy making frameworks designed for national settings to examine global governance phenomena. With the construction of a causal mechanism adapted from the Multiple Streams (MS) framework, I conduct a within-case process tracing study on the emergence of a revelatory and information-rich transnational private regulator – the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP), an initiative that employs a two-pronged regulatory strategy to set global norms and principles in public procurement transparency and participation and promotes a technical disclosure and data standard for voluntary adoption. Empirical tests on a large body of diagnostic evidence are performed to detect and analyze the observable fingerprints surfaced from OCP’s development trajectory over the course of 10 years, with data from nearly 1000 documents from three different sources, as well as interviews with almost all founding members of OCP, and the global policy community comprised of organizational elites from international organizations active in the open government movement. This dissertation demonstrates that a complex web of rationalistic, governance, and institutional factors influenced how OCP emerged. The multi-layered policy environment empowered and constrained the rule-making process. Specifically, economic, and political focusing events, regulatory voids at the transnational level, and a high degree of stability of the policy coalition in the open government policy field propelled the global policy community to endorse a new policy alternative designed by a non-state actor. And the deliberate epistemic, instrumental and advocacy efforts exerted by OCP founders were also critical in ensuring that the policy conditions were ripe for a private alternative. This dissertation also questions the presumed state of organized anarchy speculated by the MS framework, and shows that changes in policy problems and policy solutions streams would largely leave the politics stream unaffected. Suggestions are offered on how to further enhance the TPR causal mechanism by combining compatible concepts from Kingdon’s MS framework with Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s advocacy coalition framework.
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