Social Network Analysis of Transnational Sustainability Standard Communities

• In Event: Policy Networks

Abstract

Transnational private standards addressing social and environmental problems have proliferated over the last two decades. Accordingly, meta-governance organizations were created to facilitate collective action among standards and shape organizational legitimacy. While sustainability governance literature has put increasing attention to transnational private standard communities in the same issue area, little is known about to what extent such meta-governance organizations have facilitated collaboration and coordination among their members. To bridge this gap, this paper asks: what forces shape interactions among standards in the meta-governance networks and how do such interactions change over time? We focus on ISEAL Alliance, the most influential meta-governance organization of sustainability standards, and investigate three types of ties linking 21 ISEAL members from 2012 to 2017 – collaboration and partnerships, board interlocks, and joint funders. With original data coded from standard organizations’ annual reports, we use stochastic actor-oriented modelling to assess the effects of both structural and agentic forces on network dynamics. We find that, while the ISEAL networks were originally sparse, over time its members increased their collaboration and sharing expertise, despite in a limited way. The paper makes novel contributions to the study of transnational governance interactions by assessing dynamics in sustainability standard communities and impacts of meta-governance organizations.

Authors

• Yixian Sun, Yale University

• Ellen Alexandra Holtmaat, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies