In the majority of the cases examined, workers and communities sought to address their grievances through a range of host-country state institutions alongside their claims to transnational NJMs. Chapter 6 explores the conflicting roles of the state in enabling and constraining the ability of NJMs to support community struggles for redress. Non-judicial mechanisms sometimes enlisted useful support from various state agencies, drawing on the distinctive functional capacities and sources of legitimacy that state agencies possess. However, other state agencies also, at times in the same case, attempted to block or at least significantly impede NJM efforts to influence redress processes and outcomes. The chapter shows that because state actors often hold highly ambiguous roles as enablers as well as regulators of business-related human rights violations, opportunities for transnational NJMs to actively collaborate with national governments in addressing grievance claims were usually limited; instead, the ability of NJMs to support human rights redress often depended on indirect or unintended effects of their interactions with the state. Consequently, it was not primarily via efforts to actively collaborate with governments that transnational NJMs contributed to redress, but rather through shifting power balances among competing coalitions of actors engaged with grievance struggles, inside as well as outside the state.

The final chapter of the book reflects on its lessons, concluding that the responsiveness of NJMs to the dynamics lying behind grievances – understood as fields of struggle – is key to delivering remedy. This is true whether the relevant NJM is central to that struggle, or whether (as is more often the case) it plays a more peripheral or supportive role within broader processes of decentered regulation. Transnational NJMs may lack coercive power, but they span jurisdictions that state bodies have difficulty regulating. In principle, they have greater capacity to design new approaches as problems arise, benefiting from independence, shorter institutional histories and more capacity to experiment than state bodies, which can experience stronger institutional inertia and political constraints. To strengthen their capacity to build and sustain influence, NJMs should be designed to be nimble, with a range of functions and structures and resourced with staff capable of reading and navigating the deeply contested fields of business and human rights.

The institutional design of NJMs varies considerably in the manner they enable, empower or constrain worker and community struggles. Whereas the UNGPs effectiveness criteria, along with other key contributions to the NJM design literature, emphasise the importance of procedural fairness, across the cases we studied purely procedural efforts were insufficient to address the deep imbalances of power between business actors and aggrieved communities. However, in some cases, these imbalances were ameliorated by aspects of institutional design that the UNGPs effectiveness criteria leave implicit: the financial and human resources the NJM can mobilise, the authority it can command and the extent to which its design enhances its capacity to exercise leverage in support of human rights redress. Even where the NJM’s design provides leverage, NJM staff frequently hesitate to flex institutional muscle for fear of jeopardising crucial resources and relationships. As such, the usefulness of transnational NJMs’ interventions often depends crucially also on factors beyond institutional design, namely the extent to which aggrieved communities are able to draw on and effectively deploy other forms of leverage and influence.

Central to all the cases studied in this book is a power struggle between business, workers and communities over rights, norms and resources. Business strategies erode community strength and divide communities and co-opt nationalist and development narratives. Business models reduce transparency and obfuscate their responsibility. Applying the fields of struggle lens, Chapter 5 explores the factors that enable some communities and workers to achieve remedy, however rare and minimal. As might be expected, success is driven by cohesion and solidarity within worker and community groups, as well as robust networks with sustained local and international networks of campaigners. Notably, the analysis also reveals that in the cases we examined where some remedy was achieved, elite business networks or key businesses in value chains espoused ethical and sustainable business norms, which were leveraged effectively by civil society networks to provide the basis for (albeit fragile) alliances between civil society and business networks against errant businesses harming communities and worker groups. Non-judicial mechanisms, as interventions in these struggles, were most helpful when they not only added their normative weight to the grievance but also reshaped the boundaries of the field to integrate and legitimate supportive allies.

Ten case studies form the empirical and analytical core of the book. Chapter 1 introduces these cases, detailing the arduous journeys marginalised workers and communities pursue in seeking redress for grievances arising from harmful business practices. Their aims vary, some wanting to improve working conditions or pursue compensation for past wrongs, others attempting to block planned business projects or create pressure for broader change to prevent recurring patterns of human rights abuse. Their efforts, together with worker and civil society allies, to gain meaningful outcomes are marked by creativity and diversity in the sheer multitude of methods utilised. Critically, transnational NJMs are only one avenue they pursue. Despite their vast efforts, significant human rights breaches persist alongside small victories. The cases provide compelling evidence that NJMs are best understood as but one actor within broader systems of transnational business regulation.

Chapter 7 draws together the findings of the book concerning the impact of NJM interventions on community and worker struggles to achieve remedy. Lessons are drawn from both widespread failure and small gains. ‘Success’ is more likely, in the sense that aggrieved communities and worker groups are more likely to attain the outcomes they pursue, when NJM interventions facilitate the influence of communities within wider fields of struggle. These interventions include NJMs enhancing the credibility and public awareness of the alleged rights violations, strengthening alliances between actors supportive of redress, leveraging aspects of state and business power that empowered those alliances and enhancing claimants’ skills in advocacy and negotiation. Nonetheless, effective NJM interventions depend on the characteristics of the relevant field of struggle, such as distributions of power within a given supply chain, distributions of business and civil society access to state power and prior histories of campaigning and political organisation in particular sectors and locations.

Are non-judicial approaches to remedying business-related human rights violations a good use of the resources invested in them, or a counterproductive distraction from alternative legal or activist pathways to remedy? This chapter outlines the book’s approach to exploring this divisive question, drawing on field-work intensive case studies of human rights grievances across three industrial sectors in Indonesia and India. This introductory chapter launches the book’s argument that while NJMs are seriously limited in their ability to deliver adequate human rights redress, NJMs can nonetheless make small but useful contributions to broader struggles for human rights remedy, never by substituting for binding state-led regulatory and redress processes, but rather by providing entry points through which workers and communities can sometimes mobilise additional resources or sources of leverage in support of their struggles for redress. These findings imply the need for a responsive approach to NJM institutional design and regulatory strategy, in which NJMs are mobilised more explicitly as part of a wider field of struggle to counterbalance some of the entrenched inequalities that buttress recurring patterns of human rights grievances around the world.

In the cases at the heart of this book, the power struggles around grievance claims are central, not peripheral, to whether and how NJMs can contribute to redress. To account for this, in Chapter 4 we build a distinctive conceptual approach: a ‘fields of struggle’ lens to capture the way transformative agendas are heavily dependent on wider processes of economic, social and political struggle. This lens draws from sociological scholarship on fields together with work by political economists and economic sociologists that highlight the centrality of power inequalities to regulatory outcomes. Our concept is further strengthened by recognising the specific forms of business, state and civil society power and agency available within each field. A field-of-struggle lens brings to light how these varying kinds of power are drawn into regulatory struggles and the ways the socially embedded interests of participants in regulatory processes shape how such power is harnessed strategically within struggles over grievance and to what end.

When NJMs fail to deliver remedy, criticism is often first levelled against their institutional design: the policies, processes and powers that characterise their operations. Chapter 2 interrogates literatures that conceptualise and critique effective design, primarily theories of non-judicial governance and regulation within the business and human rights scholarship focused on NJMs and approaches captured under the term ‘new governance’. Four elements of institutional design receive particular emphasis in these literatures: efforts to establish accessible and fair non-judicial procedures, processes that support socialisation and learning, strong institutional capacity and resourcing and provisions to help motivate businesses to engage with non-judicial redress processes. This scholarship, though, often overlooks important areas of ambiguity, firstly, whether and how design can encompass and respond to the divergent purposes and aims that animate grievance claims and, secondly, implications for institutional design that arise from recognising the embedding of regulatory and redress processes in broader, and highly unequal, social relations.