Transnational Organization(s) as Governance: A Comparative Analysis of Private Rules beyond the State

Organization, as a key concept for understanding the current global order, does not only exist on the international level, but increasingly manifests itself on the transnational level too. Transnational organization has many sources and appears in many forms. As a relatively recent phenomenon, transnational rule-making processes could be considered the most apparent expression of the shift from state-driven politics and intergovernmental cooperation to non-state-driven governance in world affairs. In recent years, a number of rule-making processes have emerged around issues of global sustainability politics. However, most research on non-state actors and their roles in environmental politics has focuses on rather traditional forms of policy-making firmly directed towards states and embedded in the inter-national paradigm. This paper contributes to the conference theme by assessing the roles and functions that transnational forms of organization perform in world politics. As most research in this field has hitherto focused either on instances of business self-regulation or publicprivate cooperation, this contribution takes a closer empirical look at those forms of transnational organization that include both the profit as well as the non-profit side of transnational society (business co-regulation). While the first part of this paper introduces the concept of transnational organization as governance, the second part discusses the possibility of assessing the influence of governance arrangements and theoretically distinguishes between three different mechanisms of transnational governance, namely regulative, cognitive, and integrative governance. Subsequently, the third part comparatively analyses the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) as two examples of transnational organization(s) with regards to their roles and functions in global environmental governance.