Governing on par with states: Private power and practices of political normalisation
Juanita Uribe discusses the key points from her new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article at - Governing on par with states: Private power and practices of political normalisation.
Introduction
The involvement of private actors in global politics has long been widespread. For decades, companies, philanthropic organisations and profit-driven entities have – directly or indirectly – influenced decision-making processes by assuming tasks traditionally reserved for states. However, in recent decades, the forms and scope of their engagement have taken on new proportions. The financialisation of development and the rise of multi-stakeholder governance have brought about a significant shift in the discourse surrounding the engagement of private actors: corporations, philanthropies, and businesses are no longer merely seen as actors executing delegated authority; instead, they are embraced as fully-fledged political equals, indispensable for addressing societal problems. This is visible in multiple global forums. Take the example of the Tropical Forest Alliance: decisions about forest preservation are made collectively by a Steering Committee, where representatives from companies like Unilever—deeply invested in palm oil production—sit on an equal footing with governments. These actors make decisions on par with governments, under the only premise that they too, have a ‘stake’ in the problem—even when that stake is primarily financial.
These observations led me to ask the following questions: How did private actors shift from being entities to be regulated to being viewed as a necessary part of solutions to global problems? How have private entities, largely accountable to shareholders, evolved into states’ political ‘partners’? What kind of politics does this shift render possible?
As private actors become prominent players in global politics, scholars have sought to understand the sources and mechanisms of their authority and legitimacy. A vast body of scholarship has developed around the need to better understand how entities lacking any form of democratic accountability were able to establish themselves as authoritative rulers. One key explanation has been to show that private actors legitimise their role in reference to shared normative standards, typically invoking norms stemming from democratic ideals. For example, in contentious fields such as security, the legitimacy of private actors often hinges on their connections to a democratic state. Another explanation emphasises how private actors use self-governing practices and backdoor processes to build their charisma and appear rightful in the eyes of public opinion. Industries like tobacco, food, and health, for instance, have employed diverse tactics to foster positive attitudes toward their activities.
However, I make the claim that in the contemporary era of hybrid public-private authority, legitimation practices do not fully capture how private actors ‘do’ politics. No longer just performing delegated governmental functions, private actors are nowadays invited to govern alongside sates under a logic of political equivalence.
Therefore, I decided to shift the attention away from legitimacy and examine instead how private actors are increasingly shaping the frames of reference, discourses, and meanings of what is seen as commonsensical or valid, or what Foucault referred to as the ‘general politics of truth.’ This, I argue, requires a more detailed analysis of processes of ‘political normalisation’, or the extent to which private power shapes the processes that determine ‘correctness,’ ‘adequacy,’ and the most appropriate ways of knowing problems and conducting politics. The power of normalization lies in shaping not so much how things are but how they ought to be. While normalisation processes are not exogenous to legitimacy, they are not entirely equivalent. Normalisation processes prompt us to empirically focus not on how private actors gain authority or legitimacy, but on how they are increasingly involved in shaping the conditions under which something is deemed legitimate in the first place.
In the paper, I introduce three practices of normalisation through which private networks normalise their political power. The first practice is the individualisation of social problems, which consists of positioning solutions that increase the demand for a certain product as the only ‘evidence-based’ options. The second practice, defining institutional aptness, refers to how private actors are increasingly involved in determining the ‘adequate’ loci of power for governing issues, often by discrediting multilateral institutions for their shortcomings in managing the delivery of these ‘evidence-based’ solutions. The third practice, cultivating the landscape, represents a proactive approach by powerful economic networks to plant and nurture small and medium-sized initiatives—ranging from funds and non-profits to consultancies—which, in close partnership with IOs and governments, naturalise market narratives as the best, if not the ‘only,’ way forward.
Empirically, I focus on global food and nutrition policy. While private actors have long been part of the landscape of global food and nutrition governance, discourses around their political indispensability and roles have significantly expanded in the past few decades. Indeed, since the early 2000s, ‘solutions’ like vitamin capsules, micronutrient powders, and fortified foods—produced by the food industry, agribusinesses, and pharmaceutical companies—have been positioned by powerful economic networks as the only ‘evidence-based’ solutions to hunger and malnutrition. This is despite evidence from food sovereignty and agro-ecological approaches showing that structural dimensions—such as land concentration, industrial agriculture, intensive farming, and marketing practices—play a key role in sustaining hunger. The promotion of vitamins and fortified products as the best way to address hunger coincided with the marginalisation of the United Nations as the primary locus of global nutrition governance. Private networks, which coalesced around the World Bank, actively pushed for the UN mechanism to be replaced by the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement (SUN), a multi-stakeholder platform deemed more ‘apt and agile’ to deliver these ‘evidence-based’ solutions. Operating under a strong donor-driven focus, SUN includes food corporations such as Cargill and Unilever as part of its core constituencies. From then onwards, philanthropic players such as the Gates Foundation together with funds and corporations have carefully cultivated the landscape by nurturing a web of medium-sized initiatives that in close partnership with IOs and governments spread market-based narratives.
What are the implications of these practices of political normalisation in the field of food and nutrition? First, and most obviously, private actors who contribute significantly to unhealthy diets through the production of ultra-processed food are incorporated into governance arrangements as part of the solution rather than treating them as those who need to be held accountable. This leads to a blurring of boundaries between duty-bearers, duty-holders, and rights-holders. Second, and more generally, the trend toward hybrid power can also inadvertently lead to novel dynamics of exclusion and accumulation. The fact that private actors are assuming novel political roles and shaping the boundaries of political ‘normalcy’ positions profit as the main yardstick through which the value of problems is assessed. It also diverts resources toward private hands, where money ‘delivers’ the most value and earning potential.
There are reasons to expect that the core argument of the paper can travel to other issue areas – though with potentially different expressions. Security and technology governance are examples of sectors in which normalisation is widespread but less premised on consumer narratives than on an ‘efficiency’ and innovation rhetoric. By contrast, in internet governance – often regarded as the archetypal multistakeholder model – governing with private actors may serve as a way to circumvent the purely intergovernmental model advocated by actors such as Russia and China. However, even in this realm, a degree of caution is required, as normalisation can foster dependency logics, making it increasingly difficult for public authorities to enforce their own regulations without the ‘collaboration’ of industries such as Big Tech.
Amidst the normalisation of discourses around the ‘necessity’ of ‘partnering’ with the private sector to solve global problems, the aim of this paper is therefore not to reject their presence outright, but to render claims about their indispensability ‘awkward’.
Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000780
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