@article{e7deffc2652a4324855f1e5bcfa3b87f,
title = "Private regulation, public policy, and the perils of adverse ontological selection",
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",
author = "J. Grabs and Graeme Auld and Benjamin Cashore",
note = "Funding Information: Janina Grabs wishes to thank the Land Nordrhein-Westfalen, Ministerium f{\"u}r 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 Westf{\"a}lische Wilhelms-Universit{\"a}t M{\"u}nster 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, and Stacy VanDeveer, for valuable feedback on earlier drafts. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Funding Information: Janina Grabs wishes to thank the Land Nordrhein‐Westfalen, Ministerium f{\"u}r 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 Westf{\"a}lische Wilhelms‐Universit{\"a}t M{\"u}nster 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, and Stacy VanDeveer, for valuable feedback on earlier drafts. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. 1 Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 The Authors. Regulation \& Governance published by John Wiley \& Sons Australia, Ltd.",
year = "2021",
month = oct,
doi = "10.1111/rego.12354",
language = "English",
volume = "15",
pages = "1183--1208",
journal = "Regulation and Governance",
issn = "1748-5983",
publisher = "Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd",
number = "4",
}