Private Governance Legitimacy: A Comparison of 'Input', 'Output' and 'Hybrid' Approaches

Introduction In the past, food scares, animal cruelty, pollution and other scandals would trigger a round of governmental regulation. Over the last two decades, however, a wide ranging critique of the supposedly inflexible, inefficient and costly nature of these ‘old’ governance approaches has proved effective. The critique has resulted in a raft of ‘new’, ‘informational’ policy instruments (guidelines, codes of conduct, certification, labels, ratings and rankings) being used to replace mandatory ‘command and control’ measures. Today, many industry sectors are crisscrossed with a complex array of complementary and competing, public and private, schemes, which target concerns over food safety, biosecurity, quality, animal welfare, workers’ rights, environmental impact, use of chemicals, and energy efficiency (see Abbott & Snidal 2009 for additional sectors). In particular, the proliferation of non-governmental schemes in discrete industry sectors is raising concern over their legitimacy. Since non-governmental schemes cannot rely as state regulation does on the presumed legitimacy of Westphalian authority and party-political, aggregative, democracy, what, if anything, makes them legitimate as governance arrangements? Three competing frameworks have been advanced to date in the literature. Cashore et al (2004) have developed a ‘non-state, market-driven’ framework for understanding these non-governmental schemes that focuses on the ‘output’ legitimacy of schemes with important audiences, especially business. In contrast, Cadman’s Quality Governance framework (2011) advances a perspective grounded more in ‘input’ legitimacy and the nature of the processes by which decisions are arrived at. Meanwhile, Schouten and Glasbergen (2011) have adopted what can be termed a ‘hybrid’ approach that examines schemes across their legal, political and moral dimensions.