Regulating Multinational Corporations: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

The once orderly arrangement of public and private power, of domestic and international law, and of the institutions through which these arrangements were realized has been upended by the very same structures legitimated in political, economic, and legal theory. In place of the state, the production chain increasingly serves as a basis for collective governance. Domestic and institutional actors along with states, now engage in a world order marked by fracture, fluidity, permeability, and polycentricity. This world governance order is characterized by a stable universe of objects of regulation around which governance systems multiply and in which law is one of several systems of governance that has an impact on the organization of human and communal activity. These contradictions lie at the heart of the subject of this article -- the challenges and opportunities, and the legal and public policy context of multinational corporation or enterprise (MNE) regulation. MNEs have transcended their traditional limitation for lobbying on the national level, and have begun to involve themselves directly within global economic regulations.