Transnational Sustainability Governance and the Law

Transnational governance raises challenging questions about the appropriate roles of legal institutions, states, and global markets in realizing and protecting social and environmental sustainability. Diverse groups of actors, ranging from multinational companies to grassroots social movements, engage in manifold strategies to respond to the consequences of economic globalization on local environments, precarious workers, and Indigenous and traditional communities. This chapter evaluates transnational governance activities in light of a dichotomy between two opposing globalizations, one which is focused on realizing economic solutions to the economic factors that threaten sustainability, the other which leverages the mobilization of bottom-up social movements to develop political responses. Through examples of private rulemaking, corporate self-regulation, transnational constitutional movements, extraterritorial legislation, and transnational litigation, this chapter identifies conflicts about the capacity of global markets to guarantee social and environmental sustainability, as well as the role of the contemporary state and its institutions in governing global market actors.