Who Fills the Global Governance Gap? Rethinking the Roles of Business and Government in Global Governance

Political CSR has made great strides towards a better appreciation of the political involvement of corporations in global governance. However, its portrayal of the shifting balance between business and government in the globalized economy rests on a central, yet largely uncontested, assumption: that of a zero-sum constellation of substitution in which firms take on public responsibilities to fill governance gaps left by governments. This conceptual paper expands the political CSR perspective and makes three contributions to the debate on the political role of business and the role of government in global governance. First, it deconstructs the problematic assumptions underlying the zero-sum notion of governance gaps filled by corporations. Second, it offers a variable-sum mapping of how private and public authority interact in global governance where substitution is only one of four constellations. The mapping identifies ‘soft steering’ as a prominent mode of governments governing business conduct. Third, the paper theorizes ‘orchestration’, a ‘soft steering’ tool discussed in the global governance literature, from an organizational, corporate perspective. It identifies the mechanisms through which orchestration may address the barriers to corporate engagement with the public good and applies these mechanisms to the case of the Global Reporting Initiative.