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The international emergence of alternative corporate forms and certifications has given credence to a new strain of law developing within the corporate sustainability movement, known as social enterprise law. What are some of the trade-offs that accompany such laws? Upon canvassing the development of social enterprise lawmaking initiatives worldwide, two preliminary observations arise. First, the majority of social enterprise laws, particularly in Europe and Asia, are designed to address the targeted needs of special and/or marginalized populations. The minuscule number of these businesses formed to date suggests that concerns over the shrinking of public goods and services remain largely theoretical. Second, U.S. benefit corporation laws may only strengthen erroneous beliefs on existing corporate law and governance – thus creating impediments to broad-scale sustainability change. The aggressive pursuit of a global market by private U.S. entrepreneurs behind the B Corporation certification and benefit corporation laws contrasts starkly with state-led initiatives. Benefit entity statutes risk hollowing out public infrastructure in favour of the private Americanization of good governance standards in non U.S. countries.

Introduction In this chapter, we explore how changing political visions, socio-cultural imaginaries and hydro-territorial configurations interact with shifting practices of water justice. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates comments that justice is what those in power consider just. Over the centuries, this statement has haunted any discussions and efforts to create a fairer society. Recent social-justice debate has extended to include the physical world as an integral component in structuring just/unjust socio-ecological relations. This chapter examines how hydro-territorial politics finds expression in the diverse actors’ confluences and encounters with spatial and political-geographical projects that compete, superimpose and align their territorialization strategies to strengthen their governance positions, ideologies and water-control claims. This continuously transforms the territory’s hydraulic grid, cultural reference frames, economic base structures and political relationships. Territorial struggles go beyond battles over natural resources per se, as they also involve conflicts over meaning, norms, knowledge, decision-making authority, representations and discourses. Policy actors commonly tend to present socio-natural, geopolitical territories as mere biophysical “nature” or legal-administrative “governance units,” portraying water problems and solutions as politically neutral, technical and managerial issues to be objectively managed through “rational water use” and “good governance” - a conscious or unconscious veil to legitimize deeply political choices sustaining specific political orders (Harris, 2009; Hommes et al., 2016; Perreault, 2014). Challenging such powerful conventions, we examine the contradictions, conflicts and societal responses generated by the configuration of hydrosocial territories (see Boelens et al., 2016; Swyngedouw and Williams, 2016); how water politics are ingrained in such socio-natural and techno-political arrangements, enhancing or challenging unequal distribution of resources and decision-making power in water governance (Boelens, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2015). Therefore, hydrosocial territories (imagined, planned or materialized) have contested functions, values and meanings as they define processes of inclusion and exclusion, development and marginalization, and the distribution of benefits and burdens that affect different groups of people in distinct but often deeply unequal manners. Taking the co-production of “nature and society” in twentieth-century Spain as our entry point, we seek to elucidate the relationship among transformations in and of “hydrosocial territory,” the state, and the contested modernization, and to tease out the multiple power relationships that enroll, transform and distribute water. In doing so, we seek to excavate how nature becomes political and, through this, how environmental reconfiguration parallels ongoing state transformation (Swyngedouw, 2014; cf. Carroll, 2012; Perreault et al., 2015).

Long proposed in aspirational terms, good governance has increasingly become a subject of substantive global policy debate and international rule-making. An analysis of recent negotiating exercises, such as World Trade Organization (WTO) accession protocols and the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), shows that governance has been discussed among WTO members and embedded in WTO rules. This chapter first examines how WTO accession protocols addressed the issue of governance improvement by subjecting acceding governments to binding, accession-specific commitments. These commitments, in addition to ensuring greater market openness and integration in the rules-based global economy, established the legal basis for the increased rule of law for acceding members. The commitments undertaken by these members demonstrate their adherence to principles of transparency and predictability of trade policies, as well as their overall commitment to subject domestic trade regimes to international trade law. Improved governance is achieved through the entirety of WTO accession-specific commitments on rules, including the ones on transparency, policy enforcement, trading rights, state trading/state-owned enterprises (STEs/SOEs) and government procurement. A similar trend can be observed when analysing the good governance provisions of the new TFA, albeit with differences in their modus operandi. WTO members took a multifaceted and indirect approach, seeking to improve integrity by increasing transparency, strengthening due process rights and reducing space for discretionary action. Together, good governance provisions in accession protocols and the TFA contribute to building the upper floors of the new multilateral trading system by creating a binding set of rules and new standards that will be respected by virtually the entire trading world. Good governance – commonly understood as taking and implementing sound government decisions – has been a much-discussed objective of international public policy for decades, to the point where it is now considered an indispensable ‘bedrock’ principle of global affairs. As far back as the 1990s, former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan hailed it as perhaps the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting development. But while this objective has long been pursued in aspirational terms, the world's good intentions have not always been matched by concrete actions. Frequently confined to best-endeavour undertakings, good governance rarely found its way into firm international commitments and binding global rules.

Economic Security, the EU and China Economic security relates to the strategic ability of states to maintain and develop their socioeconomic system of choice and their relative economic power position under conditions of anarchy. In today's globalized world, the economic dimension of security is gaining in importance. Increasingly, threats in this realm flow from the eroded policy autonomy of major states, which reflects the heightened interdependence in the real, financial and monetary sectors of the global economy. This erosion of autonomy is exacerbated by external uncertainty, the instability of an international system that is undergoing fundamental change. China's re-emergence and mounting influence – and that of other emerging countries for that matter – is not only affecting Western developed nations’ position in the global distribution of capabilities, it also constitutes a challenge of sorts to their very identity (Geeraerts 2011; Kupchan 2012). The successful economic growth of such an idiosyncratic power as China defies the present international order, which largely mirrors the Western worldview of liberal democracy and free markets (Foot 2009; Layne 2012). While, for more than half a century, the United States, in tandem with the EU, has watched over the provision of global public goods such as monetary stability and free trade, and has propagated the practice of good governance, human rights, international trade regulations, humanitarian intervention and state-building, recently the credibility of the United States and EU as political drivers of global governance has been put to the test (Kupchan 2012: Acharya 2014). As much as the United States, weighed by debt and deficits, is struggling to maintain its superpower status, the EU, faced with the eurozone debt crisis, is struggling for its very survival. Meanwhile, China's growing economic clout has increased its political influence well beyond its borders and is turning it into a more confident player. Gradually, Beijing is also developing an alternative discourse of modernity and spelling out its own narratives of global governance (Schweller and Xiao Pu 2011; Pan 2012; Breslin 2013). Part of these narratives question the present global governance regime's ability to provide economic and monetary stability, as well as its authority in setting norms of good governance. As a rule, emerging powers tend to be suspicious of existing international regimes which tend to favor established powers.

Most Americans are repulsed by governments that fail to provide good governance and security to their populations. But most are also reluctant to ask their own governments to take action or spend money to remedy such problems, especially after nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq failed to live up to expectations. In the current climate of declining budgets and skepticism about the effectiveness of foreign aid, the only way to convince the American people to invest in the third world is to show that it will both enhance American security and save American lives and money. As this and subsequent chapters will show, human capital investments are inexpensive in relation to the threats they mitigate, and they often yield dividends at rates that rapidly recoup the initial outlays. THE THIRD WORLD AND U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY At the start of the Cold War, the earth was said to have three worlds. The first world consisted of the United States, the other industrialized democracies of the West, and Japan. The second world encompassed the Soviet Union and the communist nations of Eastern Europe, mortal ideological enemies of the first world. Soviet efforts to convince Western Europe's first world countries to switch sides came to naught, in part because of American infusions of money into Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. America's entreaties to Eastern Europe's second world countries also failed to yield converts, because Soviet tanks showed up whenever the Eastern Europeans tried to break ties with Moscow. The countries most receptive to first and second world solicitations, and hence the ones that would be most fiercely contested, were the nations lying outside of the first two worlds, termed the third world. Lacking the modern industries of the first and second worlds, the countries of the third world were much weaker economically and militarily. Most of the third world countries in Asia and Africa had been European colonies before World War II and owed their newfound independence to a combination of European debilitation during the war and the rise of indigenous nationalism. Set adrift in a sea of global struggle between the great powers, they found themselves incessantly courted by the emissaries of the United States and the Soviet Union and the smaller nations of the first two worlds.

The previous chapter explored the domestic mechanisms of generating normative constraints on behavior. But international factors in controlling corruption should be discussed as well, given the growth of an international anticorruption community and the creation of aid conditionality in this regard. Is the international community able to create serious constraints impacting the national level? The equilibrium pictured in this book is reached – or not reached – there only. Any influence, either on resources or constraints, needs to have a national impact to be defined as such. Can external agency influence this domestic equilibrium – for the worse, but especially for the better? The international influence on governance of interest in this chapter is not the side effect of international trade or development aid. Deliberate effort is made by the international community to support domestic control of corruption. The fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed an international process without precedent in ambition and depth: the peaceful democratization and transformation of countries by external actors represented by the international community. The lessons of 1989 were well learned and seemed to indicate that sufficient external pressure (in the form of economic and political conditions) combined with domestic agency of sufficient proportions can change political regimes. It worked marvelously in Central Europe and the hope was that an action model had been created that could be applied further to great effect. Compared to this grand drive to change undemocratic political regimes, improving governance might seem a mere addition, a far less ambitious side goal. But while evidence existed that externals can play some role in democratizing a country (Huntington 1993), next to nothing was known about influencing governance from outside. It was largely presumed that some formal institutional transfers in the fields of civil service or the judiciary targeted by donor programming could improve a country's governance. The first serious academic accounts sounded the alarm, however, that areas such as justice and administration reflect closely the existing power equilibrium in a society and with their high transaction costs and high discretion are quite difficult to influence from outside (Carothers 1998; Fukuyama 2004). By transferring institutions, international donors are attempting to change governance orders after having tried – and, to some extent, succeeded – with political regimes.

This book is about the quiet exercise of power through indicators. With the turn to evidence-based governance, reliance on statistical data along with its synthesis into the kinds of scales, ranks, and composite indexes we refer to as indicators has become essential for policy formation and political decision making. The use of indicators in governance has expanded from economic and sector-specific quantitative data to measurement of almost every phenomenon. This book focuses on indicators of governance itself, specifically governance through law: indicators purporting to measure practices or perceptions of good governance, rule of law, corruption, regulatory quality, and related matters. This volume presents nine original case studies that investigate how leading indicators of legal governance produced with global or transnational scope or aims are created, disseminated, and used, and with what effects. The indicators studied include Freedom House's Freedom in the World indicator, the Global Reporting Initiative's structure for measuring and reporting on corporate social responsibility, the World Justice Project's measurement of the rule of law, the Doing Business index of the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, the World Bank–supported Worldwide Governance Indicators, the World Bank's Country Performance Institutional Assessment (CPIA), the Transparency International Corruption (Perceptions) index, and several indicators (including some of these) used by the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation in determining which countries are eligible to receive certain US aid funds. The underlying theoretical framework of this volume is the linkage between knowledge and power. Indicators are both a form of knowledge and a technology for governance. Like other forms of knowledge, indicators influence governance when they form the basis for political decision making, public awareness, and the terms in which problems are conceptualized and solutions imagined. Conversely, the kinds of information embodied in indicators, the forms in which they are produced and disseminated, and how they function as knowledge are all influenced by governance practices.

We will have a kind of symbolic and secularized society based on the premise that people voluntarily conform to the decisions of authorized expert knowledge. But while order is being established, responsibility may be vanishing. Bengt Jacobsson (2000, 40) (T)he inequality between one who gives orders and one who must obey is not as radical as that between one who has a right to demand an answer and one who has the duty to answer. Milan Kundera (1991, 110) The studies in this collection, building on previous important contributions to the discussion (see especially Davis, Kingsbury, and Merry 2012a, 2012b), offer a set of rich and insightful discussions of social indicators that have potentially global implications. The focus here is on the wider relevance of those indicators that seek to compare levels of political freedom, the rule of law, corruption, good governance, and corporate responsibility. In their introduction, the editors explain what is distinctive about their approach. They tell us that most of the literature on indicators focuses on how to develop effective, reliable, and valid measures. It looks at how to conceptualize what is to be measured, how to operationalize broad and vague concepts, what data sets are available that can be used, how to label indicators so that they will be easy to understand, and how to persuade governments, donors, and other potential users of the indicator to pay for and use them. In contrast, this collection asks what difference indicators make to governance and law. It examines how indicators work in practice, why some become successful. My task in this afterword is to reflect on what the chapters in this book tell us by way of answers to these questions. In particular I shall point to some of the difficulties of actually separating the question of explaining the causes of what they call an indicator's “success” from the search for developing more effective indicators.

Norm-building has been one of the main preoccupations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) since its creation in 1967. Since its formative years, Member States have held sacred its traditional norms – i.e. protection of State sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as the principle of non-interference. However, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which led to democratic transition in Indonesia and calls for political reforms in other parts of the region, the idea of a people-centred ASEAN emerged as key to transforming this regional organisation. In 2003, the Bali Concord II – also known as the ASEAN Community Framework – incorporated principles that give importance to the promotion of democracy, good governance and the rule of law among its Member States. Subsequently, the adoption and ratification of the ASEAN Charter and the creation of a regional human rights body in 2008 and 2009, respectively, became part of the process of norm-building within ASEAN. This chapter identifies the institutional frameworks of ASEAN that could be linked to the norm of Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) and attempts to examine the process and dynamics of norm-building and practice of human rights and civilian protection in the region. It argues that although ASEAN has not formally adopted the language of RtoP in its institutional frameworks and documents, it has nonetheless incorporated certain elements of the norm, particularly in the areas of human rights promotion, international humanitarian law, as well as principles related to conflict prevention and post-conflict rebuilding. ASEAN members have also ‘practised’ some elements of RtoP albeit unconsciously, as demonstrated in the case of Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and participation of some of its members in UN peacekeeping operations within and outside the region. This regional organisation clearly has a long way to go as far as capacity-building of its Member States in the preventive aspect of RtoP is concerned. Even so, ASEAN and the larger security framework of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) have a significant role to play in strengthening and implementing the norm in this part of the world.