Private actors such as businesses increasingly assume governance power and legitimacy, with far-reaching effects on public interests, including human rights. They thus gain private authority, as opposed to the public authority of states. However, the public–private distinction does not sufficiently capture the variety of governance actors, or the forms of power and legitimacy they wield. Rather, businesses and other governance actors may assume public and private roles, as well as a third kind of role that transcends the categories of public and private. 

In this Global Governance Talk, Janne Mende will develop the category of the ‘societal’ to rethink the public-private relationship and governance authority.  Conceptualizing governance authority as composed of power, legitimacy, and a connection to public interests, she addresses how business roles escape the binary distinction between public and private without being reducible to the merger of the two. Based on this, she then proposes the concept of business authority, which constitutes a particular form of governance authority alongside public and private authority.

Speaker

Janne Mende, Global Governance Centre Visiting Researcher & Senior Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law

Discussant

Sabine Pitteloud, Lecturer in the Department of History, Economy, and Society at the University of Geneva

Moderator

Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, Professor of International Relations/Political Sciences and Director of the Global Governance Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute