Private regulation, public policy, and the perils of adverse ontological selection

Grabs, Janina; Auld, Graeme; Cashore, Benjamin Article — Published Version Private regulation, public policy, and the perils of adverse ontological selection Regulation & Governance Provided in Cooperation with: John Wiley & Sons Suggested Citation: Grabs, Janina; Auld, Graeme; Cashore, Benjamin (2021) : Private regulation, public policy, and the perils of adverse ontological selection, Regulation & Governance, ISSN 1748-5991, John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd, Melbourne, Vol. 15, Iss. 4, pp. 1183-1208, https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12354 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/230175 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Private regulation, public policy, and the perils of adverse ontological selection Janina Grabs Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (D-GESS), ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Institute of Political Science, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany Graeme Auld School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Benjamin Cashore Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, USA Abstract What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics –calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo-Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance’s problem-solving potential and its interactions with public policy. Keywords: critical review, ontological influence, private regulatory governance, public policy, public–private interaction. 1. Introduction Private regulatory governance systems 1 now pervade the global economy. While complex and multifaceted, they share three key attributes that are considered necessary and sufficient for the definition used in this paper: the formulation of procedural and/or substantive rules and standards by nongovernmental actors (usually firms or nongovernmental organizations), their monitoring and enforcement through the same actors or third parties, and the preferential treatment of actors in compliance with such rules, for example, through improved reputation, market access, pricing conditions, or access to financing. These systems target business operations ranging from financial reporting (Büthe & Mattli 2011) and carbon accounting (Green 2010) to sustainable agriculture, fisheries, and forestry practices (Cashore et al. 2004; Ponte 2012; Fransen 2015). 2 State actors have supported private regulatory governance initiatives through public procurement practices (Weller & Pritchard 2013), as parts of “regulatory”or “policy mixes”(Gunningham & Sinclair 1999), and via layering with public rules (Howlett & Rayner 2007; Bartley 2011b). Such interactions have gained increased scholarly attention (Eberlein et al. 2014; Wood et al. 2015, 2019; Renckens 2021), as illustrated by the theme of this Special Issue. Simultaneously, the study of such systems and their interactions with public policy has risen within several sub-disciplines, ranging from business ethics to rural sociology. Each discipline has brought its own (and often multiple and competing) ontological, conceptual, and epistemological orientation(s) to theorizing about the Correspondence: Janina Grabs, Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (D-GESS), ETH Zurich, Sonneggstr. 33, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland. Email: [email protected] Accepted for publication 30 July 2020. © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Regulation & Governance (2021) 15, 1183–1208 doi:10.1111/rego.12354 emergence, evolution, and problem-solving potential of private regulatory governance. This article argues that explaining divergent conclusions on these questions requires carefully unpacking the reasons behind these different accounts. This is particularly important for analyses of the role of the state and public–private interactions, given that different ontological orientations might give opposite recommendations on the most effective role of the state in supporting private regulatory governance. As a starting point, and with the intention of opening a wider debate about whether embracing a plurality of ontologies as a corrective might have its own challenges, this article identifies five approaches under which scholars from different disciplines have studied private regulatory governance: calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalism; political institutionalism; power in global value chains; and neo-Gramscian perspectives. It maps these approaches on two axes: one, whether they see individual agency or broader-level structure as the dominant force shaping social and political phenomena; and two, whether they are more concerned with explaining specific phenomena and their outcomes at one point in time (synchronic) or in a historically explicit perspective across time (diachronic). We find that the respective approaches’focal scopes –that is, which actors and relationships they put into focus, and to what factors they assign ceteris paribus status or ignore –affect the conclusions they draw about the problem-solving potential of private regulatory governance, the circumstances under which collaboration, coordination, competition, or collusion between private and public governance efforts may occur, and the necessity of public intervention to assist private regulatory governance initiatives in meeting their problem-solving potential. 3 These differences matter for two reasons: one, scholars studying private regulatory governance will draw better informed conclusions if they can critically assess the broad range of perspectives in the context of their ontological grounding. Two, the co-evolution of private governance and their academic study can lead to feedback effects where scholarship informs private standard setting and public policymaking. Such evidence-based policymaking is often desired and seen as best practice. Yet, ignoring the existence of multiple ontologies can facilitate selection bias in the types of scholarship practitioners adopt: most likely, practitioners will favor those aligned with the prevalent ontological perspectives in their own epistemic community. This may lead to important blind spots and adverse decisionmaking if certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others (Cashore & Bernstein 2018, 2020). Ultimately, it must be understood that each theory contributes different insights to questions of how to address environmental degradation and socio-economic injustice and inequality. This insight is crucial when considering which theories’policy recommendations are most likely to reach policymakers in the crowded marketplace of ideas. 4 We provide a first attempt to guard against adverse ontological selection by presenting a range of major approaches and their divergences, and putting them into conversation. It is our hope that this article will encourage fellow scholars of private governance to reflect on their ontological grounding, make it more explicit, as well as integrate knowledge from other disciplines and approaches into their findings in an interdisciplinary manner. More importantly, given that all the private regulatory systems they research were created to address some kind of specified “on the ground problem,”we encourage all scholars to clearly identify what types of problems go to the heart of their own project, and what types of problems might likely be made worse off by implementing private regulatory governance initiatives. 2. Ontological diversity in private regulatory governance: An overview The rich spectrum of theoretical perspectives on private regulatory governance can be explained by the historical development of the academic literature examining such regulatory schemes. This literature arose in disparate scholarly communities related to the particular topic at hand. Organic certification, for instance, tended to be conceptualized and assessed by those trained in disciplines with a traditional interest in agriculture, such as rural sociology, geography, and development studies (Guthman 1998; Raynolds 2000; Renard 2003; Mutersbaugh 2005). Forestry certification, another early case, tended to be analyzed by forest sociologists with backgrounds in sociolegal studies (Meidinger 1997) or the public policy of resource management (Elliott & Schlaepfer 2001), which were institutionally embedded within schools and institutes of forestry and resource management. Literature on private regulatory governance targeting climate change has no similar historically institutionalized disciplinary emphasis. Rather, the phenomenon’s growing salience has attracted attention from scholars educated in public © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.1184 J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore Private regulation and adverse ontological selection policy and international relations (Green 2010; Keohane & Victor 2011; Abbott 2012; Hale & Roger 2014; Abbott et al. 2016). This historical evolution of scholarship of private regulatory governance has led to readily distinguishable discipline-topic “clusters,”and a multidisciplinary analysis of standards and certifications (alongside the organizations that serve these governance functions) that has included scholars from political science, law, economics, geography, business, sociology, ecology and conservation biology, anthropology, and development studies. Multidisciplinarity has fostered a welter of theoretical perspectives on private regulatory governance. Some lenses are agent-centered, building explanations for why private regulation forms on the basis of actors’boundedly rational calculations and interactions. Other lenses foreground power relations derived from structural positioning and features of global supply chains or capitalism. All of these lenses are grounded in assumptions, ontologies, and epistemologies –some unique, some overlapping –that shape what they perceive to normatively matter and how research can and should inform our understanding of private regulatory governance as a phenomenon. We are not the first to note this proliferation of approaches (c.f. Falkner 2003). Authors such as Bartley (2007b), Bernstein and Cashore (2007), Auld et al. (2008), Fransen (2011), Eberlein et al. (2014), and Grabs (2020a) have distinguished between diverse views of the rise of private regulation and have drawn on multiple theoretical antecedents. While valuable, these first steps toward theoretical juxtaposition have nevertheless not assessed the broader array of theoretical lenses currently used to make sense of private regulatory governance. Indeed, each of these previous reviews have had implicit boundaries (for instance, Eberlein et al. (2014) omit work from rural sociology that focused on organic and Fairtrade initiatives, such as work by Julie Guthman, and do not provide any explanation for the scope of their review). Our analysis has boundaries as well, but we make them explicit in the methods section by delineating which literature was excluded from our scope and for which reasons. Such an orientation should make it easier for future work to build on these carefully delineated categories, or offer a different direction. 3. Conceptual approach to identifying and analyzing ontological differences In our effort to make such a contribution, and for reasons of parsimony, we center our focus on ontological differences. These are differences in “fundamental assumptions scholars make about the nature of the social and political world and especially about the nature of causal relationships within that world”(Hall 2003, p. 374). They are found in conceptualizations and representational vocabulary that “carve the world at its joints”and define how to frame and, subsequently, analyze private regulatory governance initiatives. Unpacking such ontological differences, and linking them to the resulting divergent empirical accounts of private governance initiatives’ problem-solving potential and interactions with public policy, can allow students of public policy and practitioners to better assess the ways in which private governance impacts different kinds of public problems, positively and negatively. We take inspiration, in part, from Graham Allison’s (1971) seminal work on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which uncovered the possibility of explaining the same event in world affairs in radically different ways subject to one’s conceptualization of governmental decisionmaking. He further demonstrated how these different approaches led to widely divergent conclusions on the political and bureaucratic reforms necessary to prevent a similar crisis from reoccurring. Likewise, Young (2002) highlights differences in conclusions and policy recommendations on the effectiveness of international environmental institutions, depending on whether collective-action or socialpractice models are applied. Our work carries this inquiry, hitherto focused on state action, into the realm of private regulatory governance and its interaction with public policy. Unlike Allison however, we also recognize that different ontologies do not simply offer unique explanatory accounts for the same phenomenon, they also reflect, and reinforce, different types of problems. To advance this agenda, we inductively identify and describe five theoretical traditions (or approaches) that the literature has used to date. Our analysis first presents stylized overviews of how the five theoretical approaches explain the emergence and development of private governance, focusing on two dimensions: whether agency or structure-related explanations are favored, and whether synchronic or diachronic approaches are taken. We selected these as core ontological differences to focus on from a broader range of factors (compare Table A1 in the Appendix), given their explanatory power in shaping evaluative and prescriptive considerations. The first dimension explores how approaches deal with the agency-structure problem well-known to social inquiry in general (Giddens 1982) and political science in particular (Wendt 1987; Dessler 1989). It describes the © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. 1185 Private regulation and adverse ontological selection J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore dilemma that “human agency is the only moving force behind the actions, events, and outcomes of the social world”; but “human agency can be realized only in concrete historical circumstances that condition the possibilities for action and influence its course”(Dessler 1989, p. 443). Though it is uncontentious that both elements play a role in determining social outcomes, different theoretical approaches lie on a spectrum in stressing one element –agency or structure –over the other in their research questions, assumptions about human behavior, causal explanatory theories, and theories of change (Dessler 1989). Making this difference explicit helps to explain divergences in their evaluation of past and likely outcomes of private regulatory governance. The second dimension describes whethertheoreticalapproachesseeastheirprimaryaimtheanalysisofphenomena bound in time, or their development over time. The synchronic perspective prioritizes space over time and sees the world as a “system of interrelated parts with a tendency to equilibrium”(Cox & Schechter 2002, p. 28). Hence, historical dimensions of policy development are of less importance than “getting the mechanism right”and replicating it across cases. A diachronic perspective, in turn, prioritizes time over space and enquires “into the ruptures and conflicts that bring about system transformation”(Cox & Schechter 2002, p. 28). It thus takes a more longitudinal approach to scientific inquiry and highlights the importance of context-specific, historical, and evolutionary knowledge. Differences along these two dimensions will influence theoretical approaches in their perspective of what needs to happen to make private regulatory governance work well, and how public policy can support this path. In order to link our analysis to the rapidly developing literature on public–private regulatory interactions (see other contributions to this Special Issue; Eberlein et al. 2014, Wood et al. 2015, 2019, Renckens 2021), we furthermore closely examine the role of the state for each approach: both from a positivist perspective –that is, what importance state action has for the emergence and development of private standards, and what interaction pathways are highlighted in the analysis –and a problem-oriented viewpoint –i.e., what public policy actions are necessary or should be taken to support the effectiveness and regulatory power of private governance. 4. Methods We use a critical review methodology to assess the literature on private regulatory governance and advance its conceptual development. Our review focused on scholarship that treats the emergence, evolution, and functioning of private regulatory governance as the central phenomenon of interest. We did not focus on work examining broader phenomena, such as transnational governance, or work that uses private regulatory governance as an illustration of some other social, political or economic process. Notably, our analysis excludes, but also provides a basis for future assessments of impact evaluations, which usually attempt to characterize the on-the-ground effects of private regulation, but, with rare exceptions (e.g. Grabs 2020b), rarely confront their own implicit ontological preferences or biases. Moreover, we do not review work from anthropology, ecology, or land science, and the work of socio-legal scholars. This final field of scholarship is well developed and extensively reviewed by others (e.g. Wood 2015) and is understood to transcend the agency-structure and synchronic-diachronic dimensions we focus on in our review. Hence our work paves the way for further assessments on how the ontologies reviewed in this article might have conversations with other epistemic communities that do not fit within our scope conditions. A critical review “presents, analyses and synthesizes material from diverse sources,”“includes a degree of analysis and conceptual innovation,”and presents as a result “a synthesis of existing models or schools of thought or […] a completely new interpretation of the existing data”(Grant & Booth 2009, p. 93). Its main advantage lies in the ability to take stock of previous achievements, identify (and possibly resolve) competing schools of thought, and provide conceptual innovation. It can further highlight “problems, discrepancies or areas in which the existing knowledge about a topic is untrustworthy”(Paré et al. 2015, p. 189). It thus focuses on analyzing the conceptual contributions of each included item and providing its own interpretative contribution, thereby accelerating the process of evolution or accretion usually necessary for conceptual innovation (Grant & Booth 2009). Accounting for the space constraints typical for journal articles, and given the close engagement with the reviewed texts necessary for a critical review, such a review needs to balance parsimony with representativeness when selecting which material to analyze. This challenge is heightened by the fact that the search and appraisal criteria of a critical review are less formal and structured than those found in meta-analyses, systematic, or umbrella reviews (Grant & Booth 2009), and it “rarely involve[s] a comprehensive search of all of the relevant literature”(Paré et al. 2015, p. 189), instead pursuing a more selective approach. If the review’s aim is to provide a © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.1186 J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore Private regulation and adverse ontological selection comprehensive summary of all research efforts in the field of interest, a critical review method is thus more vulnerable on the grounds of subjectivity (Paré et al. 2015). Yet, as Grant and Booth (2009, p. 97) note, this is usually not the intended purpose of a critical review, as its “interpretative elements are necessarily subjective”as well. Hence, “the resulting product is the starting point for further evaluation, not an endpoint in itself.” Given these considerations, we believe the critical review methodology is best suited for our purposes for two main reasons. First, this paper’s main aim is to highlight and illustrate the co-existence of multiple ontological approaches in the study of private regulation, rather than provide a comprehensive, multidisciplinary review of all literature on private regulation in existence. We leave the latter project to future work. Second, the purpose of this exercise is to compare and contrast the ontologies, framings, and language used in the study of private regulatory governance across disciplines. It thus explicitly recognizes that private regulatory governance has been studied under a variety of names and concepts. Recognition of this leads to several challenges about what type of empirical review of the literature is most appropriate. One approach would be to make a selection of appropriate journals as well as keywords and conduct an exhaustive but focused systematic literature review. 5 However, given the diversity of terms used for studying the same phenomenon in different disciplines, for our purposes this approach is both challenging as well as prone to bias and oversight of potentially relevant pieces. Instead, we aimed to identify the broadest possible range of pieces tackling private regulatory governance phenomena from a variety of disciplines, including political science, public policy, management studies, business ethics, industrial relations, law, geography, sociology, development studies, and environmental studies. We did this in three steps: first, by drawing on the extensive bibliographies assembled by the three co-authors in over 20 years of experience in working on private regulatory governance in a multidisciplinary manner (but publishing mainly within the political science, public policy, and development studies realms); second, by supplementing this list with relevant work highlighted in review articles created in relevant subfields (Falkner 2003; Schneiberg & Bartley 2008; Vogel 2008, 2010; Büthe 2010; Mayer & Gereffi2010; Bartley 2011a; Esbenshade 2012; Auld & Gulbrandsen 2013; Wahl & Bull 2014; Bush et al. 2015; Ponte 2016) and finally, by soliciting feedback from scholars working on private regulatory governance to help us identify potential omissions. After assembling a list of key articles, we inductively classified them in groups according to their explicit mention of a theory or framework (e.g. Neo-Gramscian, Global Value Chain, or convention theory) or implicit alignment with broader theoretical frameworks (e.g. individual rational choice or political institutionalism). We then compared the resulting groups in terms of their underlying ideas about how actors behave and how private governance emerges, develops, and institutionalizes. Through this assessment, we joined some of the distinct sub-groups into larger groups due to their similarities in approach. This process identified the five categories of ideal-type theoretical approaches that our analysis reviews. Through a recursive feedback process that solicited input from colleagues in adjacent disciplines, we refined the framework and ensured that our scope was as extensive as possible given the space constraints present. Given these constraints, we are only able to incorporate a small share of the articles that might be of relevance for this framework; thus, we encourage future researchers to probe the relevance of our analysis in their particular subdisciplines and, if necessary, extend it. Figure 1 presents the five theoretical traditions we identified alongside their conceptual distribution on the agency-structure and synchronic-diachronic continua. Their representation as areas rather than points captures the variance between approaches within the same theoretical tradition, and the existence of efforts to combine and connect various strands of the literature. For all these reasons we do not claim exhaustiveness in coverage of either literature or theoretical approaches. Our approach also means that the mention of a specific author or paper in one category does not signify that the paper or author belongs exclusively to that camp. Nevertheless, we believe our review captures to a high degree the ontological diversity that exists in the study of private regulatory governance. 5. Five academic logics for analyzing private regulatory governance 5.1. Agent/synchronic: Calculated strategic behavior We start with a group of models and approaches that use calculated strategic behavior –at an individual, firm, or organizational level –as the main explanation for outcomes within the realms of (private) governance. These contributions are rooted in models of rational choice or bounded rationality, and follow a “logic of consequences” © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. 1187 Private regulation and adverse ontological selection J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore (March & Olsen 1996) where agents make choices based on pragmatic evaluations of the costs and benefits of likely outcomes. Agents also have considerable freedom to change their choice –for instance, of participating in a voluntary scheme –if shifting circumstances lower the relative pay-off of their initial selection. Hence, the problem-solving effectiveness of private governance initiatives depends strongly on the confluence of demand and supply factors that create continuous incentives to “ratchet-up”private governance efforts, both in sectoral breadth and topical depth. The synchronic focus on achieving demand-and-supply equilibria within existing market structures and institutional fit with micro-level rational-choice agent behavior leads analysts to be cautiously optimistic on the likely problem-solving potential of private governance schemes, particularly when problems are narrowly viewed as market information failures. Conversely, such theories rarely reflect on the historical dimensions of the issue at hand, but take these as given and focus on finding workable solutions to the identified coordination problems. 6 This category of theories treats the state as an actor with unique capacities and limits. An actor-centric view brings attention to what the state is not doing (intentionally or not) and how private regulatory governance serves to address state failures, in some instances, or operate as a resistance to the state in other instances. Normatively, from a problem-solving perspective, states are also seen as actors with specific capacities that can help coordinate actions. This is particularly the case if public policy action creates sustained economic incentives to comply with private schemes (for instance, by creating demand for certified products or allowing certifications to signal compliance with import restrictions), or provides incentives for schemes to improve their internal procedures and standard-setting practices. 5.1.1. Calculated strategic behavior of individual consumers At the lowest level of aggregation, micro-level theories focus on individual consumers’boundedly rational behavior in relation to eco-labeling, certification schemes and other types of consumer-facing private regulatory governance. Two intersecting streams of literature are relevant: one originates in political science and the other builds on social psychology, behavioral economics and microeconomic theories of supply, demand and information signaling within markets. The political science literature has generally treated consumers’preference for eco-labeled products as an instance of political consumerism (Stolle & Micheletti 2013). Political consumerism is understood as harnessing the “consumer choice of producers and products with the goal of changing objectionable institutional or market practices,”based on attitudes and values such as social justice, fairness, and ethical assessments of unfavorable business practices (Micheletti et al. 2004, pp. xiv–xv). Positive political consumerism consists of the preference for products that carry certain ethical, political, or other process-based attributes (Micheletti & Stolle 2008). This avenue of action critically relies on the possibility of identifying such preferred products among the plethora of market options. Third-party eco-labels and other types of certification schemes are hence given the functional role to empower citizen-consumers through the provision of consumer choice within the marketplace. Limits to positive political consumerism include the fact that “many products –in particular brand name clothing and shoes –are not covered by labeling schemes”(Micheletti & Stolle 2005, p. 259). The mobilization of different types of political consumerism, in turn, is seen to constitute a powerful form of individualized collective action (Micheletti 2003) that could utilize demand-side market signals to make individual citizen-consumers’voices heard in new arenas of political action in which states have tended to “lose control [...] over the authoritative allocation of values in society”(Stolle et al. 2005, p. 251). In comparison to the remaining agent-centric approaches below, scholars of political consumerism are optimistic about the likely effectiveness of harnessing individual consumers as change agents driving demand –so long as they are provided with the instruments (i.e. eco-labels and certification schemes) to make informed purchasing choices. The same ontological framework, focusing on boundedly rational individual behavior, offers more nuanced accounts that see limits to such transformative action. Consumer research in behavioral economics and social psychology provides increasing evidence of an “attitude-behavior gap”in which consumers’stated preferences for ethically or sustainably labeled products do not match their purchasing practices (Vermeir & Verbeke 2006; Papaoikonomou et al. 2011). Two explanations are offered for this gap. The first notes consumers’limited processing and decisionmaking abilities in an increasingly overwhelming and complex marketplace (Carrington et al. 2014). It suggests that consumers’use of choice heuristics, or decisionmaking short cuts, mean they may © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.1188 J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore Private regulation and adverse ontological selection buy things that do not align with their ethical or political preferences (Macdonald & Sharp 2000). The second finding relates more closely to the difficulty of appropriately assuring and reflecting the value of so-called “credence attributes”(that is, product attributes which cannot be discovered either before or after purchase, such as the conditions of their production process). 7 The information asymmetry inherent in abstracting a set of practices into a single label (such as, “organic”) can lead to a phenomenon akin to Akerlof’s (1970) “market for lemons,” in which consumers’uncertainty about the credibility of the credence attribute leads to a lower willingness-to-pay for such goods than their real cost of production would warrant (Grolleau & BenAbid 2001; Harbaugh et al. 2011). In consequence, insufficient consumer demand is created to allow for the sector to thrive (see e.g. De Pelsmacker et al. 2005). In both cases, these limits to effective political consumerism may be overcome if strong private regulatory organizations engage in in-depth and continuous awareness-raising campaigns to demarcate their particular niche market and defend the legitimacy of the credence attributes their labels guarantee (Guthman 2004a). Nevertheless, consumer research speaks to the existence of “label fatigue”as eco-labels and firm-issued seals have proliferated in supermarkets, overwhelming intendedly conscious consumers (Harbaugh et al. 2011; Isenhour 2015). Theories focused on the calculated strategic behavior of individual consumers thus view state intervention – both from a positivistic and problem-oriented perspective –as helping correct market failures in the “credence market”for sustainable products. Consumer protection from fraud and disinformation has in effect been used as a strong argument for the co-optation of private governance by the state, such as the intervention of various public authorities (for instance in the European Union, Japan and the United States) in the definition and accreditation of organic standards (Arcuri 2015). Scholars focused on the publicization of formerly private regulatory regimes accordingly analyze the effects of such actions on consumer choice and changes to a certification program’s average level of stringency and, hence, level of credence attributes provided. Normatively, many information economists argue that public regulation and monitoring is necessary to overcome the information asymmetry between consumers and producers and ensure the efficient functioning of markets, particularly given the likelihood of adverse selection in a purely private regime (Vetter & Karantininis 2002; Brécard 2014). While sophisticated, the narrow focus of this actor-centric approach causes it to see private governance as providing potentially positive outcomes if information asymmetries are corrected. It does not emphasize structural challenges that caused the problems in the first place, or examine whether private governance might resolve or reinforce structural issues such as power imbalances or the persistent exploitation of labor or resources. Figure 1 The five presented ontologically distinct academic logics for analyzing private regulatory governance. © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. 1189 Private regulation and adverse ontological selection J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore 5.1.2. Calculated strategic behavior of producing firms Mattli and Woods (2009) focus more on producing firms by examining who benefits from the development and enforcement of private regulation. This captures the main preoccupation of (bounded) rational choice theorists who focus their analysis on individual firm-level actors, and who presuppose that these actors aim to make optimal choices –in the case of economic producers, mainly defined by profit maximization –subject to the constraints imposed and the information available to them. This framework is strongly informed by game theoretical approaches to collective action problems (Abbott & Snidal 2001) and club theory, where firms and producers are seen to join voluntary regulatory schemes to protect their collective reputation (Potoski & Prakash 2005, 2009). Voluntary standards are conceptualized as “clubs that require firms to incur costs not required by law that lead to the production of positive environmental externalities”which in return provide shared branding benefits to club members (Prakash & Potoski 2007, p. 774). Such branding benefits aim to protect firms from sustained “naming and shaming”by NGOs that is perceived to damage their reputation and shareholder value (Fransen & Burgoon 2012; Dauvergne 2017). Rational choice themes also show up in those who emphasize the pragmatic expectations of firms to gain a competitive edge, avoid costs, or improve market access or profit rates (Cashore 2002; Gulbrandsen 2004). From a game theoretical perspective, private governance is seen with moderate optimism. It is expected to be particularly successful in solving coordination problems with few distributional consequences, in which private governance rules tend to become self-enforcing because every actor benefits from their adoption. On the contrary, in cooperation problems (e.g. the prisoners’dilemma), compliance with private governance involves individual sacrifices, which makes shirking and freeriding more likely and complicates effective institutionalization (Büthe 2010; Auld 2014). 8 An absence of focal institutions in most issue areas, where collective standard-setting may take place (e.g. the International Organization for Standardization), is an additional hurdle to achieving collective benefits. Thus, standard-setting and certification organizations have to simultaneously create their standards and the reputational branding benefits that club members enjoy, while also many times competing with alternative initiatives for members and viability. In those cases, rational actor behavior under conditions of iterative rule-making, competition between standards, and easy entry and exit conditions of voluntary schemes can lead to regulatory capture (Gulbrandsen 2004; Pattberg 2005) and adverse selection (Lenox & Nash 2003). Alternatively, high compliance costs with private regulatory institutions can create institutionalized trade barriers due to regional economic disparities (Espach 2006; Marx & Cuypers 2010) and incomplete on-the-ground implementation. Under such conditions, state action can provide important demand incentives through public procurement (Cashore 2002), the provision of assistance to encourage participation in regulatory regimes and facilitate compliance (Gulbrandsen 2004), or the reinforcement of private standards by state-based regulatory policies (Vogel 2009). To be sure, rational choice theorists are not sanguine: the majority of authors writing from a rational-choice perspective range from agnostic to critical about the ability of market conditions alone to provide sustained incentives for large-scale compliance (particularly in the Global South) without the shadow of state action (Abbott & Snidal 2009b). Nonetheless, there is a tendency to advocate for institutional tinkering in order to achieve results, rather than critiquing private governance itself. Rational choice theories that criticize private governance see the concept of “orchestration,”or centralized steering, as an important task for improving uptake. This includes emphasizing the role of international organizations and governments to allow decentralized private regulation to realize its true potential (Abbott & Snidal 2009a). Such efforts –as all attempts at effective, resource-efficient governance –are recognized as being subject to principal-agent dilemmas and trade-offs between competence and control (Abbott et al. 2018). Still, just what these trade-offs mean for solving the core problems targeted by private regulatory governance (e.g. deforestation or human rights abuses) is underemphasized in favor of institutional solutions to coordination challenges. 5.1.3. Calculated strategic behavior of certification organizations A third, closely related strand of literature sees private standard-setting and certification organizations themselves as rational actors that take decisions expected to lead to optimal outcomes for their organizational survival. This perspective flips from problem solving around environmental and social challenges to a focus on institutional © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.1190 J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore Private regulation and adverse ontological selection Table 1 Differing ontological approaches and consequences for the study of private regulatory governance and public– private interaction Theoretical approach Logic (private regulatory governance will lead to problem-solving if/when…) Explanatory role of state Optimism or pessimism regarding problemsolving potential Role of state in problem solving Agentsynchronic (calculated strategic behavior) Institutional environment is incentive-compatible for the internalization of environmental and social externalities and upward competition; opportunities for cheating are minimized State as actor with specific capacities and limits; failings of state as partial motivation for rise of private governance Cautiously optimistic in potential to overcome market information failures and solve collective action problems, though limits due to bounded rationality, incentives to shirk, and a potential “race to the bottom” Functional role to steer and coordinate benefits of private governance activities Agentdiachronic (learning and experimentalist processes) Effective frameworks allow for deliberative processes that lead to industry-wide learning, refinement of collective goals, and collective problem-solving State as part of experimentalist governance infrastructure needed to respond to complex problems Forward-looking cautious optimism due to potential of actors to change their motivations and problemsolving approaches through learning and experimentation Functional role to orchestrate decentralized problem-solving; differing accounts on amounts of steering necessary Agent/ structurediachronic (political institutionalism) Civil society groups can forge strong alliances to take advantage of points of leverage that emerge from “imperfect” negotiated systems and move them toward convergence at a high level States as shaping both larger political context and specific conditions within which private regulatory governance emerges Skeptical, given the historical nonemergence of a strong alignment of values, priorities and actions amongst contentious, politicized stakeholders with different pre-existing resources and power Depends on the underlying ideological and normative background of state actors which may lead them to create or, alternatively, strive to overcome large-scale macroeconomic and political barriers to problem-solving effectiveness Structuresynchronic (global value chain and convention theory) Private regulations are able to allow all (esp. marginalized) producers to capture higher shares of the final price by shifting relative power dynamics or enabling “upgrading”along the value chain States’retreat from transnational economic governance opens up space for private regulation (less likely to be equity-enhancing) Pessimistic due to the interaction of private governance with largerscale, hierarchical, often exploitative governance mechanisms within the value chain based on market power Stronger intervention and “shared governance approach”to allow for better benefit-sharing Structurediachronic (neo-Gramscian perspectives) Challenger organizations (in civil society) use their limited resources strategically and win in the “war of position”with current market actors (large firms) and achieve new hegemonic equilibrium State as promoting or unable to intervene in neoliberal project of deregulation and replacement with private rules Pessimistic due to the overarching strategic power of hegemonic actors that allows them to quickly absorb, dominate and re-interpret efforts to subvert the dominant system of value distribution Depends on ideological orientation of government in power; unlikely to contribute to problem-solving unless questioning of greater economic system © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. 1197 Private regulation and adverse ontological selection J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore absorbs challenges and preserves essential features”(Levy et al. 2016, p. 366) –which in many instances are the features that private governance schemes such as Fair Trade aimed to disrupt in the first place (Guthman 2007). Private governance is thus conceived as a strategic and marginal concession to foreclose bigger challenges that threaten a hegemon’s position (Bloomfield 2012, p. 394). The state plays an interesting role in Neo-Gramscian accounts. Generous accounts view states as constrained by neoliberal institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, that limit their ability to advance real sustainability. Private governance serves to make things worse by further legitimizing state withdrawal from responsibility for global environmental problems (Moog et al. 2015). In a slight variant, others see states as both structurally dependent on businesses (for tax revenues, employment and investment) and ideologically aligned in their prioritization of competitiveness and economic growth (Levy & Egan 2003). Public policy involvement through collusion with private regulatory entities is thus considered either unhelpful or downright detrimental for the goals of civil society, at least as long as states continue to pursue neoliberal agendas. One of the most critical perspectives comes from Bloomfield (2012). He notes that even the notion of states losing control over business may be an artifact of the ideological hegemonic structures at work, reinforced by intellectual elites such as mainstream international relations and global governance scholars “forward[ing] the myth of the powerless state in a global economy, naturalizing a deliberate policy of nonintervention in markets” (Bloomfield 2012, p. 394). Rather, “a critical lens suggests that the state has maintained significant control[;] from the perspective of the neoliberal state, the real challengers are not the economic forces it has unleashed, but the civil society initiatives that have emerged to reregulate them”(Bloomfield 2012, p. 408). Consequently, he issues a warning “against simply reinvesting our energies into “reestablishing”state control. Despite the short-comings of approaches that seemingly conform to the requisites of deregulation, the state is not necessarily a reliable alternative. After all, it is not only vital to ask who regulates, but for whom they are regulating” (Bloomfield 2012, p. 409). 6. Discussion and conclusions Our review underscores that different theoretical approaches deal with the same research subject –private regulatory governance –from radically different viewpoints and ontological underpinnings (Fig. 1). The ontological differences relate to how these theories view what is real in the world in general and what is relevant to examine about private regulatory governance. While this overview is limited to two –agency-structure and synchronicdiachronic –out of many possible dimensions that could be juxtaposed (see Table A1 in the Appendix), 14 we find that these central differentiating dimensions help clarify: the theoretical approaches’respective problem framing, that is, their problematique; the likely contribution of private governance for problem solving; and the importance of public policy interventions in achieving those aims (see also Table 1). Approaches that focus on agency over economic or political structures are the most optimistic that private governance institutions can serve as effective arenas to solve collective action problems. This is particularly the case in the bottom-left corner of Figure 1, where a diachronic emphasis sees agents’preferences and behavior as malleable over time, subject to the influence of norm cascades and collective learning. Such perspectives (c.f. Bernstein & Cashore 2012, 2007) are future-oriented, taking current actors and behaviors as points of departure but seeing a broad array of possible pathways forward. More static, synchronic analyses that focus on actors’ agency (in the top-left corner) facilitate the most fine-grained, micro-level investigation of comparative costs and benefits of various types of regulations, including private governance institutions. Akin to most theories of rational choice and bounded rationality (c.f. Hall & Taylor 1996), approaches using calculated strategic behavior allow for parsimonious and elegant explanations of observed behavior by individuals, firms and organizations that participate in private regulatory governance regimes. By extension, they highlight rationalist-economic barriers to the proper functioning of private governance that public policy may address. However, in contrast to diachronic approaches, they say little about wider-reaching changes to socio-political systems that may be initiated by the interaction of public and private governance. Structural-diachronic approaches such as neo-Gramscian perspectives are well equipped to deal with such questions (Fig. 1). This lens is able to fit its analysis of private regulatory governance into a much wider context and point out power dynamics that fall outside the micro-level’s scope. As a tradeoff, however, the aggregation of © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.1198 J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore Private regulation and adverse ontological selection actors into “historical blocs”and the focus on a dyadic struggle may hide intra-bloc differences in objectives and strategies. Bringing more accuracy to specific interactions within present power structures is possible when adopting a more synchronic focus, such as is done in global value chain analysis. This analysis can again be extended toward a more diachronic emphasis when including evolutionary changes to terms of trade and agreements by incorporating convention theory. Finally, political institutionalism, due to its more balanced approach on the horizontal axis, draws on the interaction of agents and (imposed or pre-existing legal and socio-economic) structures as its central problematique. In total, the analysis illustrates that here, as in Allison’s (1971) case, most approaches offer only partial models of the way in which private regulatory governance works. We can therefore also follow Allison in inquiring whether the models can “be understood as building blocks in a larger model of the determinants of outcomes”(Allison 1971, p. 275). However, treating the different ontologies as building blocks may be problematic. They exhibit notable differences in the extent to which they allow individual agents’choices to overcome structural preconditions, for instance those related to power and resource asymmetries (on the horizontal axis) (c.f. O’Neill et al. 2004), and whether they view social phenomena through an inherently static or dynamic lens (on the vertical axis). These ontological differences may provide a powerful explanation for why different scholars talk past each other even when engaging with the same institutional phenomena, and raise important questions about whether frameworks in opposing cells can be fruitfully integrated into a general model. Hence, our analysis is consistent with Allison’s findings that “refining partial paradigms, and specifying the classes of actions for which they are relevant, may be a more fruitful path to limited theory and propositions than the route of instant generalization”(Allison 1971, p. 275; compare also Shapiro, 2002). The identification of such limiting conditions is highly instructive to provide refined policy advice. To contribute to this goal, Table 1 draws out the different approaches’view of solution pathways, the role of the state to date, their optimism, skepticism or pessimism regarding private governance’s problem-solving potential, and their implicit or explicit normative stand on the necessity and type of public intervention that may allow private regulatory governance to achieve the goals it was created to address. The important point here is not simply that there are competing explanations for understanding the same phenomenon, but competing explanations often reflect different problem definitions that, more often than not, are inversely related to each other (Cashore & Bernstein 2020). Hence, no amount of ontological pluralism can solve this dilemma. Recursive and reflexive theory-testing in this fashion is all the more important given that the derivation of policy advice from scholarship emerging from a variety of academic and ontological traditions is challenging when evidence is selected –implicitly or explicitly –in function of its fit to the theoretical model. As Allison (1971, p. 4) observed, “conceptual models not only fix the mesh of the nets that the analyst drags through the material in order to explain a particular action; they also direct him to cast his nets in select ponds, at certain depths, in order to catch the fish he is after.”The confluence of these factors however raises important questions regarding the public policy relevance of theoretical approaches to date. The more an approach focuses on a small sub-set of factors of the institutional landscape, the greater is its burden to prove that its conclusions are internally valid. Similarly, the more focused on a few case studies a literature becomes, the more questions arise regarding the external validity of its theoretical frame, its findings and normative recommendations. 15 Finally, the more historically grounded a theory becomes, the less clarity we have on its temporal validity –that is, could a successful private governance institution arise at any moment in time or are all cases under observation so defined by their socio-economic and political circumstances that different circumstances will lead to radically different outcomes? Teasing out these implications becomes vitally important if we aim to use the existing literature to inform public policy. Finally, a clear focus on the nature of the problem, and the ability of “partial paradigms”to inform our knowledge on the ability of institutional solutions to effectively address them, is of particular relevance in the field of private regulatory governance given the issue areas it operates in (Cashore & Bernstein 2018). Private regulation has intended to complement or replace state action in some of the most pressing issues humanity faces including climate change mitigation, the degradation of natural resources, and the exploitation of a large share of the global work force. Tackling these issues will require providing policymakers with an exhaustive array of viewpoints that reach beyond those fitting their own epistemic communities and take a critical lens to problem-solv- ing. A scholarly overemphasis on institutional characteristics and concepts such as inclusivity, accountability and © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. 1199 Private regulation and adverse ontological selection J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore deliberation may overlook that, from a problem-solving perspective (Dentoni et al. 2012, 2018), these are only intermediary features, subservient to the end of improving environmental conservation and social labor conditions and living standards. Hence, too narrow analyses might find institutional success at assembling multistakeholder regimes without proving problem-solving effectiveness, especially if underlying dynamics exist that are only perceptible by using a broader lens. For instance, one can argue that there are clear limits to using responsible and ethical consumption as a solution to environmental and social harms (Maniates 2001; Bartley 2010; Barkin & DeSombre 2013). In this sense, it may well be the case that the most important underlying causal dynamics affecting deforestation, fishery depletion and biodiversity destruction are absolute global consumption levels –which are only marginally affected, or may even be negatively influenced, by encouraging the buying and selling of certified products, and for which other policy interventions would be more appropriate, such as firm-level or consumption taxes. Some ontologies, such as political consumerism, may conversely and inadvertently focus their research and policy recommendations in areas that compound, rather than alleviate the problem. Our pointisthatifwearetofreeourselvesfromtheimplicitshacklesofontologicalinfluences, we must not avoid, but render explicit, their assumptions. To arrive at a more problem-focused approach to private governancescholarshipandtocreateeffectivepublicpolicy recommendations, this article thus calls for more critical comparison of the applicability of various ontologies, more cross-disciplinary work where appropriate –as pursued in a first step in many papers of this Special Issue –as well as more explicit and self-conscious discussions of latent ontological choices that may affect the presentation of private governance and its outcomes. In addition, we call for a greater conversation about what kinds of public problems society wishes to address –whether it is the biodiversity or climate crisis, or engaging livelihoods and local peoples in sharing the prosperity of the commodification of nature –and to develop private and public approaches accordingly, and to recognizing the countervailing impacts that are inevitably going to occur. In closing, we take our own advice in acknowledging the need for the explicit recognition of the limits of analysis of this piece. We know we have missed perspectives in this work. The field of socio-legal studies, for instance, is far advanced in examining the dynamics of private regulation –as captured by Wood et al.’s (2015) recent review and the earlier seminal work of Braithwaite and Drahos (2000). The work of anthropologists, land scientists, and ecologists are also omitted from our discussion, as are impact evaluations. Scholars have also engaged other theoretical traditions, such as Foucaultian theories of governmentality (Tregidga et al. 2019), theories and concepts from science and technology studies (Eden 2009), and actor-network theory (Vandergeest 2007). We did not aim to capture everything, but we did aim to be explicit about what we tried to capture. We hope this transparent foundation and critical review of the literature focused directly on the phenomenon of private regulatory governance (rather than the general shift in regulation as a whole) serves as a platform for others to deepen our understanding of the limits of different ontological lenses such that policymakers can be well aware of the limits and strengths of the lenses they are presented by academic analyses. Acknowledgments Janina Grabs wishes to thank the Land Nordrhein-Westfalen, Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft, for its financial support of the junior research group TRANSSUSTAIN, which allowed her to work on this manuscript. She further gratefully acknowledges that this manuscript was first elaborated during a stay as a Visiting Academic Researcher at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration. She also thanks the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster for graciously making this publication Open Access. Graeme Auld thanks Carleton University’s Faculty of Public Affairs for financial support provided through the Public Affairs Research Excellence Chair. Benjamin Cashore wishes to thank the Canada-US Fulbright Program, and the Institute of the Environment and Smart Prosperity Institute (SPI), University of Ottawa, for granting him the Canada Research Chair in the Sustainable Economy during the fall of 2017. Earlier versions of this paper was presented at the Yale-CBS Workshop on Private Authority and Public Policy, as well as the 2018 Utrecht Conference on Earth System Governance. We thank the editors of this Special Issue, the four anonymous reviewers, as well as Matthew Amengual, Jessica Green, Virginia Haufler, Kate MacDonald, Peter Oosterveer, Stefano Ponte, Stefan Renckens, © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.1200 J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore Private regulation and adverse ontological selection and Stacy VanDeveer, for valuable feedback on earlier drafts. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Endnotes 1 Such schemes have been alternatively conceptualized as nonstate market-driven governance (NSMD) systems (Cashore 2002; Cashore et al. 2004), regulatory standard-setting schemes (Abbott & Snidal 2009b), private governance organizations (Fransen 2011), transnational private regulation (Bartley 2007b), and private governance (Auld 2014), among others. 2 Within this broad category, private regulatory governance shows a high level of diversity, with, for instance, certain initiatives advancing procedural rules (e.g. financial and accounting rules) and others focusing more on substantive rules (such as in the case of sustainable agriculture, fisheries, and forestry). However, we exclude from our definition initiatives that do not include the formulation of procedural or substantive rules (e.g. pressure campaigns or boycotts), initiatives that do not primarily aim to govern business actors, and initiatives that limit themselves to the internal self-regulation of a single organization. 3 We engage in these conversations with the recognition that the problem-solving potential of such initiatives is seldom uniform: their ability to say, improve community livelihoods may be explained, in part, by their inability to conserve meaningful levels of biodiversity (Cashore & Bernstein 2020; Cashore & Nathan 2020). 4 In making these arguments, we need to acknowledge two commitments a priori: First, an explicit focus of our analysis is the contributions that ontological approaches have made toward assessing the problem-solving potential of private regulatory governance. Of course, not all approaches have such an aim; critical theory, for instance, has little ambition in this regard. In this article (and in particular in Table 1) we thus focus on including mainly theories that have a problemsolving orientation, and extract the problem-solving aspects of theories that combine instrumental and anti-instrumental strands. Second, in highlighting the dangers of a “crowded marketplace of ideas,”we implicitly replicate a liberal conception of theory-building that has been critiqued elsewhere (Koskenniemi 1999). Yet, we do so due to the reality that policy makers and practitioners do look toward scholarship for practical guidance, and will encounter a variety of publications using implicit ontological approaches when looking for answers. We do however acknowledge that this search is not value-free; and indeed policymakers are likely to prefer analyses that replicate their own ontological and/or epistemic background. It is all the more important to make these assumptions explicit. 5 Others have taken this approach. Ford (2017) used broad keywords on regulation and innovation to search LexisNexis for law review articles published in Canada and America from 1980 to 2012. Her approach retrieved 5,382 articles. Using timeweighted citations and cluster analysis, she selected 198 to code in more depth to understand how the literature has handled the topic of innovation over the period of study. Eberlein et al. (2014), as we noted above, provide no explanation for the scope of their review nor the approach taken to selecting articles, an approach that creates unknown boundaries and notable omissions. Wood et al. (2015) is more explicit about the scope of his review, but the search method and inclusion criteria are omitted. We attempt to be more explicit than these recent works, while avoiding the restrictions created by a formalized method such as the one taken by Ford (2017). Indeed, in her work, she notes the clear limits of focusing on LexisNexis, as it excludes work from sociology and other disciplines that would have been available through other databases. She did not use these datasets because they did not permit sophisticated content searches available through LexisNexis. 6 Proponents of calculated strategic behavior (especially those concerned with the behavior of certification organizations) also occasionally take on diachronic questions such as the emergence, proliferation and expansion of private governance schemes; yet, the main focus of this group of scholars is on synchronic processes. 7 Credence attributes (such as the fair trade, child labor-free or organic character of goods) can be distinguished from search attributes (such as price or appearance) which can be verified prior to purchase, and experience attributes (such as taste, comfort, or longevity) which can be known after purchase (Ford et al. 1988). 8 As Büthe and Mattli (2011) point out, in practice many coordination problems such as technical standard-setting also tend to be highly distributive in nature since the final outcome influences relative adaptation costs, leading to high-stakes negotiations at the point of rule-making. 9 While the theoretical origins of organizational ecology lie in a purely structural view of organizational emergence and change, Abbott et al.’s explicit (Abbott et al. 2013) and implicit (Abbott et al. 2016) highlighting of strategic organizational behavior within these structures warrant the inclusion of this literature within the present subcategory in our view. 10 While this literature turns to legitimacy as a term, it is used in consequentialist terms that emphasize stakeholder evaluations rather than norm-generating phenomena that cut across entire communities. 11 In classifying political institutionalism as mainly diachronic, we do not aim to claim that some political institutionalists do not apply synchronic approaches, clearly evidenced by Bartley (2007a; in a more general way, see the Varieties of © 2020 The Authors. Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. 1201 Private regulation and adverse ontological selection J. Grabs, G. Auld, and B. Cashore Capitalism and national business systems literature), but rather that diachronic questions are prioritized. Even those analyses that compare institutions across cases do so in a historically informed way and with an eye to junctures and critical decisions that influence political institutions as well as decisions made within them. 12 Here, an organizational field is defined as “a community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field” (Scott 1995, p. 56). 13 Though Auld (2014) provides an in-depth historical institutional account of private governance emergence and evolution. 14 Such dimensions include: their level of abstraction; their unit of analysis; the identity of their focal actors; their use and conceptualization of power; their choice of focusing on horizontal or vertical interactions; their choice of focusing on negotiation or deliberation as main interaction mechanism; or their choice of focusing on rules-in-the-book or rules-in- practice. 15 To add to the complexity, the expectation that theories should showcase both internal and external validity is itself grounded in certain epistemologies that not all authors are likely to share (McKeown 1999). 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