The volume combines empirical and legal research to explore the potential of self-regulation by transnational industry.

With the globalization of markets, the phenomenon of market failure has also been globalized. Against the backdrop of the territoriality of nation-state jurisdictions and the slow progress of international law based on the principle of sovereignty, this poses a serious challenge. However, while the legal infrastructure of globalized markets has a firm basis in formal, national, and international law, the side effects of economic transactions on public goods, such as the environment, human health, and consumer interests often escape state-based regulation. Therefore, attention is drawn to the potential of self-regulation by transnational industry. While hypotheses abound which try to grasp this phenomenon in conceptual terms, both empirical and legal research is still underdeveloped. Responsible Business helps to fill this gap in two ways. First, the book recontructs self-regulatory settings such as multinational corporations, transnational production networks, and industry-NGO partne

Interdisciplinary in its inception and empirical in its approach, the volume draws primarily from sociology, law, and political science to provide a through-provoking and optimistic story about the emergent potential for self-governance and private ordering to produce systems of rules and norms that increasingly-and explicitly-regulate public goods, in the public interest. The book's value is its explicitly interdisciplinary focus on empirical and legal accounts, attempting to ground governance theory in specific examples. As such, it should have wide appeal.