Global Business and Local Struggle

 Global corporations dominate many aspects of world trade and many have annual turnovers equivalent to the GDP of many mid-sized countries. But their economic footprint is commonly associated with social and environmental harms, and they are often accused of ‘jurisdiction shopping’ – sourcing from countries that have the weakest legal protections.

There is intense debate within the UN about how best to tackle this problem. In 2011, the UN Human Rights Council approved the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, a document that is relatively optimistic about the potential for transnational non-judicial mechanisms (or NJMs) to play a role in holding transnational business to account. NJMs can conduct research, make findings and facilitate negotiation and mediation, but they cannot punish wrongdoing in the way that courts can. While some commentators welcomed this positive assessment of NJMs’ potential, others condemned NJMs as a waste of time and called instead for a binding UN treaty on business and human rights. Negotiations to develop such a treaty are ongoing.

This book, co-authored by LPGCIL Fellow Tim Connor, based on five years of extensive, multi-method research—including 587 interviews with 1100 individuals across India and Indonesia—provides the definitive empirical answer to whether Non-Judicial Mechanisms (NJMs) actually work to secure human rights redress. This field research demonstrates that, while NJMs are overwhelmingly limited as standalone remedies, this does not make them useless. The particular characteristics of NJMs can provide important sources of leverage to workers and communities in their struggle for remedy, but only when used as part of broader strategies to utilise a range of regulatory mechanisms and other sources of potential support.

The authors draw on their chosen theoretical framework, a field of struggle approach, to develop a blueprint for reforming NJMs and to suggest how workers and communities can assess whether relevant NJMs might assist them in their struggle and how they might best be utilised to provide the greatest chance of positive outcomes. It is a must-read for anyone concerned about the power of global corporations.