Democratic legitimacy is rarely associated with private governance. After all, private actors are not legitimized through elections by a demos. Instead of abandoning democratic principles when entering the private sphere of governance, however, this article argues in favour of employing alternative criteria of democracy in assessments. Specifically, this article uses the criteria of participation, transparency and accountability to evaluate the democratic legitimacy of private food retail governance institutions. It pursues this evaluation of the democratic legitimacy of these institutions against the (...) background of their ambivalent impact on the sustainability of the global agrifood system. The paper refers to a range of cases of private retail standards with different governance structures and substantial foci to illustrate its argument. (shrink)

The chapter discusses the dual nature of corporate transparency politics as a means of governing and taming corporate power and as an instrument of corporate control and profit maximization. The authors conceptualize four levels of transparency practices in global production networks, arguing that the consideration of these levels is necessary to understand the political nature of corporate transparency. As Scheper and Zajak show, these levels are relevant with regard to the wider dynamics of power relations, political conflicts and social change (...) in global production networks because they link conflicts around corporate transparency with the broader debate about the ‘new’ political role of transnational corporations and a changing relationship between states, markets and civil society. The chapter concludes by calling for a new research agenda on transnational transparency politics, which introduces a cultural perspective on knowledge practices and links it with a political-sociological view on power and governance struggles. (shrink)