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This volume of essays brings together John Gerard Ruggie's most influential theoretical ideas and their application to critical policy questions concerning the post-Cold War international order.

AbstractThis article aims to inform the long‐standing and unresolved debate between voluntary corporate social responsibility and initiatives to impose binding legal obligations on multinational enterprises. The two approaches share a common feature: neither can fully specify its own scope conditions, that is, how much of the people and planet agenda either can expect to deliver. The reason they share this feature is also the same: neither is based on a foundational political analysis of the multinational enterprise in the context of global governance. Such an analysis is essential for providing background to and perspective on what either approach can hope to achieve, and how. This article begins to bridge the gap by illustrating aspects of the political power, authority, and relative autonomy of the contemporary multinational enterprise. The conclusion spells out some implications for the debate itself, and for further research.

The state-based system of global governance has struggled for more than
a generation to adjust to the expanding reach and growing influence of
transnational corporations. The United Nations first attempted to establish
binding international rules to govern the activities of transnationals in
the 1970s. That endeavor was initiated by developing countries as part of a
broader regulatory program with redistributive aims known as the New
International Economic Order. Human rights did not feature in this
initiative. The Soviet bloc supported it while most industrialized countries
were opposed. Negotiations ground to a halt after more than a decade, though
they were not formally abandoned until 1992.

This article draws attention to a fundamental reconstitution of the global public domain — away from one that for more than three centuries equated the 'public' in international politics with sovereign states and the interstate realm to one in which the very system of states is becoming embedded in a broader and deepening transnational arena concerned with the production of global public goods. One concrete instance of this transformation is the growing significance of global corporate social responsibility initiatives triggered by the dynamic interplay between civil society actors and multinational corporations. The UN Global Compact and corporate involvement in HIV/AIDS treatment programs are discussed as examples. The analytical parameters of the emerging global public domain are defined and some of its consequences illustrated by the chain of responses to the Bush Administration's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol by a variety of domestic and transnational social actors.