Transnational private regulation

Abstract

As markets and regulatory tasks become increasingly global, forms of private international regulatory cooperation are emerging along with – or sometimes as a replacement for – inter-governmental cooperation. In a number of settings, traditional forms of public intervention are facing enormous, sometimes insurmountable difficulties in coping with certain policy problems. The weaknesses of public regulation emerge more specifically at the transnational level where difficulties to coordinate, inconsistencies between standard setting and enforcement, divergences between administrative and judicial enforcement and within the latter among domestic courts make inter-state regulatory cooperation an insufficient response. This case study analyses how the development of transnational private regulation responds to the needs of globalization, while raising a number of challenges.