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The need for food safety and food quality standards is acknowledged by public regulators, private actors, and the society. The purpose of this paper is to identify the types of actors in the multilevel transnational food chain regulatory governance and how their interlinking affects regulatory outcomes over time.

Food chain regulatory standards emerge within a complex process beyond the state. Based on interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, namely regulatory governance and political economy, this paper provides a integrative framework of analysis by identifying the types of actors and their interactions in the food chain regulatory governance.

Food chain regulatory standards setting have been mainly studied either from the public regulator or the firm self-regulating point of view. This paper demonstrates how the political and economics dynamics of the interactions among public and private actors operate within the transnational food standards setting process. The study identifies the groups of interdependent actors (public and private) that interact within the transnational food chain regulatory process and develop public-private regulations, self-regulations, and co-regulations over time. In this process, the actors’ different power, operational and regulatory capacity, experience, resources affect the regulatory outcome with socio-economic and governance implications.

The paper does not examine in detail how these interactions operate empirically on specific regulations.

The paper offers an integrative thorough understanding of the food chain regulatory standard setting process, relevant for academics, policy makers, the industry, and society.

The paper constitutes new research by identifying the actors and interactions in the integrative regulatory governance of the food chain standards.

This paper provides a perspective on the field of nonmarket strategy. It does not attempt to survey the literature but instead focuses on the substantive content of research in the field. The paper discusses the origins of the field and the roles of nonmarket strategy. The political economy framework is used and contrasted with the current form of the resource-based theory. The paper argues that research should focus on the firm level and argues that the strategy of self-regulation can be useful in reducing the likelihood of challenges from private and public politics. The political economy perspective is illustrated using three examples: (1) public politics: Uber, (2) private politics: Rainforest Action Network and Citigroup, and (3) integrated strategy and private and public politics: The Fast Food Campaign. The paper concludes with a discussion of research issues in theory, empirics, and normative assessment.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a tool for the international comparative analysis of regulatory regimes in the field of building regulation.

On the basis of a heuristic model drawn from regulatory literature, a typology of building regulatory regimes is introduced. Each type is illustrated with a number of real‐life examples from North America, Europe, and Australia.

Governments worldwide have introduced building regulatory regimes with a variety of designs. On an abstract level, these designs are shown to have a comparable pattern. This pattern is utilised to draw up a typology of regime‐designs that can be placed on a sliding scale, with a “pure public regime” at the one end and a “pure private regime” at the other. Intermediate regimes display characteristics of both.

The comparative analysis of different regimes assists policy makers by demonstrating which combinations of regulatory characteristics can provide the best results in particular instances. The typology introduced by the paper assists this process by providing a tool for systematic analysis of complex real‐life cases.

A public‐private partnership can be seen as an appropriate institutional means of dealing with particular sources of market failure by creating a perception of equity and mutual accountability in transactions between public and private organisations through co‐operative behaviour. The relative merit of the idea of public‐private partnership is oriented mainly around a mutual benefit. As the roles of government in public‐private partnerships are not only to provide services, but also to monitor the marketplace, a well‐defined regulation framework is essential. A sound regulatory framework will increase benefits to the government by ensuring that essential partnerships operate efficiently and optimise the resources available to them in line with broader policy objectives, ranging from social policy to environmental protection. In turn, it provides assurance to the private sector that the regulatory system includes protection from expropriation, arbitration of commercial disputes, respect for contract agreements, and legitimate recovery of costs and profit proportional to the risks undertaken.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, the authors construct a country-specific time-varying private rental regulation index for 18 developed economies starting from 1973 to 2014. Second, the authors analyze the effects of their index on the housing rental markets across 18 countries and states.

The authors’ index not only covers 18 developed economies over 42 years but also combines both tenure security and rent laws. The authors’ empirical framework is that of panel regressions with time and country fixed effects.

The authors’ index sheds further insights on the extent to which rent and tenure security laws have converged over the past 40 years for each economy. Moreover, the authors show three empirical results. First, stringent rent control regimes do lead to lower real rent growth rates than regimes with free rents. Second, soft rent control regimes with time-limited tenure security and minimum duration periods, however, may cause higher rent growth rates than free rent regimes. Third, rent-free regimes do not show significant high real rent appreciation rates.

The authors’ rental regulation index is the first time-varying index that covers more than 18 economies over 40 years.

This paper seeks to provide an overview and context for the emerging field of public policies for scaling voluntary standards, or private regulations, on the social and environmental performance of business and finance, to promote sustainable development; in order to stimulate more innovation and research in this field.

The paper takes the approach of a literature review of texts from intergovernmental and non‐governmental organisations, to develop a synthesis of issues, before literature review from management studies, development studies and international relations, to revise the synthesis and identify policy relevant future research.

Governance at all levels but particularly the international level involves corporations and their stakeholders. Together they have created non‐statutory corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards which now influence significant amounts of international trade and investment, thereby presenting new benefits, risks and challenges for sustainable development. Governments around the world are now innovating public policies on these standards, which can be categorised to inform policy development: governments prepare, prefer, promote and prescribe CSR standards. Therefore, a new dimension to collaborative governance is emerging and would benefit from research and technical assistance. As concepts and practices of regulation and governance are moving beyond state versus non‐state, mandatory versus voluntary approaches, so issues about transparency, accountability and democratic participation remain important for any new manifestation of regulation or governance.

By contextualising public policy innovations on CSR standards within new theories of governance, including “private regulation” and “collaborative governance”, the paper helps to clarify a new agenda for policy making and related research.

The government sometimes lacks sufficient financial, management and technical capabilities to deliver construction projects. As a result, it has recognized the need to introduce private sector capital and expertise to complete unfinished construction projects. This outsourcing paradigm is known as a public-private partnership, a form of privatization. This study aims to identify the barriers associated with the transfer of unfinished construction projects to the private sector in Iran and grouped them into areas that were ranked to shed light on where the risk lies.

After a thorough and comprehensive literature review, a questionnaire was developed and distributed to 67 experts in the public and private sectors in Iran. The survey included 37 barriers grouped into seven areas and measured on a five-point Likert scale. Face validity, content validity and structural validity of the collected data were confirmed. The reliability of the questionnaire was also tested and validated using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient.

The survey findings indicated that private company laws, national constitution, government policies, lack of sufficient regulations, one-sided regulations and lack of balance, the regulations of other organizations and taxation laws were perceived as the major barriers to the transfer of unfinished public sector construction projects to the private sector in Iran. The ranking of the seven areas produced the following top three ranked barriers areas: taxation laws, government policies and one-sided regulations and lack of balance of importance.

The elicitation of this study can be useful to both private and public sectors for the development of infrastructure construction projects.

This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically illustrate the challenges that financial market regulation presents to politicians and the organization tasked with specifying regulations and supervising their implementation in the interest of users and consumers of financial instruments. It analyses the problem from the viewpoint of the governor's dilemma and the control/competence conflict, the linked problem of the rent-seeking of agents/intermediators and consumers of financial instruments. Political accountability problems are enhanced by the materiality of the technologies used, i.e. algo trading.

The paper theoretically conceptualizes and empirically illustrates the argument.

The paper finds that regulators of digitalized financial markets are faced with considerable problems and depend on private agents when regulating financial transactions. However, the new technological instruments also offer new possibilities for securing compliance.

Further research should focus more in-depth on the cooperation between public and private actors in the specification and implementation of regulatory details. It should further investigate the conditions which allow regulators to use RegTech in the surveillance of financial firms.

Since financial market transactions are opaque for most users, the creation of more transparency is crucial to hold regulators accountable in their activity of surveillance of financial firms. New algorithm-based technologies may lend important support in doing so.

By linking the different analytical perspectives, i.e. the governor's dilemma vis-à-vis the intermediator or agent and the possible rent-seeking of intermediators, under the condition of a highly developed technology of financial transactions as well as the market structure, the paper offers new insights into the limits as well as new opportunities of regulating financial markets allowing for political accountability of regulators and financial firms.

Discusses ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which is a new private corporation for managing Internet domain names and IP addresses, which was created in the USA and produces a historical and conceptual assessment of the policy involved.

Private certification systems (PCS) have emerged as governance tools for sustainable development, regulating social and environmental standards through global supply chains. PCS are seen as essentially private and market-driven, but governments have engaged with them in various ways. There are also substantial differences in the institutional design of PCS with regard to the standard-setting process, ex-ante conformity assessment and ex-post verification procedures. Consequently, what determines the institutional design of PCS has attracted growing attention. This article argues that governments, through public regulation, influence the design of PCS, which in turn affects their effectiveness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

First, a review of academic literature, policy and legal documents presents how PCS have become institutionalized in government policy, focusing on sustainable public procurement (SPP) regulation. Second, the authors explore the link between effectiveness and the institutional design of PCS by empirically assessing the variations between institutional parameters conducive to effectiveness. Data from the Ecolabel Index database were used to assess the presence or absence of four institutional design parameters related to the rule-making and monitoring mechanisms of PCS.

Public procurement regulations are important drivers influencing the institutional design of PCS. The buying power and market share of government spending is a potential tool for policy-makers not only to stimulate the adoption of PCS, but also for shaping their design and effectiveness. However, the impact of such policies is highly dependent upon the market-share of public procurement within a given sector. In addition to public procurement frameworks, other factors drive the institutional evolution of PCS.

The article connects two themes within the study of non-state market regulation; the growing interaction of governments with PCS, and the institutional variety and development of these systems.