Transnational Governance Interactions: A Critical Review of the Legal Literature

Overlaps and interactions among diverse legal rules, actors and orders have long preoccupied legal scholars. This preoccupation has intensified in recent years as transnational efforts to regulate business have proliferated. This proliferation has led to increasingly frequent and intense interactions among transnational regulatory actors and programs. These transnational business governance interactions (TBGI) are the subject of an emerging interdisciplinary research agenda. This paper situates the TBGI research agenda in the broader field of transnational legal theory by presenting a critical review of the ways in which legal scholars have addressed the phenomenon of governance interactions. Legal scholars frequently recognize the importance of transnational governance interactions, but their accounts are tentative and incomplete for the most part. Scholars bring varying—often sharply divergent—theoretical, methodological and normative perspectives to bear on the issue. Some scholars focus on rule formation, others on monitoring or adjudication. Some investigate cooperation and convergence, others conflict and competition. Some examine interactions within a particular organization or program, others among programs or even between entire normative orders. Some emphasize description or explanation, others evaluation or prescription. In short, while understanding intersections among the multiple sites, scales and instances of law is a central concern of transnational legal scholarship, the picture that emerges is incomplete and fragmented