Chapter 1 introduces the central puzzle of the book: how multinational corporations confront the growing risks and opportunities of climate change. It establishes the urgency and global salience of the issue, situating the discussion within international business and political economy scholarship. The chapter reviews existing literature, identifies key knowledge gaps, and formulates the research questions that guide the study. It then presents the book’s overarching analytical framework, integrating resource dependence theory with a typology of climate risks and corporate response strategies. By linking firm-level decision-making to national capacity and international engagement, this introduction explains how the subsequent chapters contribute to theory and practice. It concludes by highlighting the book’s dual purpose: to advance academic understanding of business strategy under climate stress and to draw actionable lessons for policymakers and business leaders.

Chapter 2 examines the dual roles that multinational corporations (MNCs) play as both contributors to and potential mitigators of climate change. Framed around the competing race to the bottom and race to the top perspectives, the chapter explores how MNCs can both weaken and strengthen environmental governance. The first section reviews evidence of firms lobbying for weaker standards and relocating pollution-intensive operations to jurisdictions with lax regulation. The second considers how MNCs may instead diffuse clean technologies and practices through supply chains and host-country spillovers. The chapter argues that these divergent outcomes depend on a set of internal and external moderating factors. Internally, industry characteristics, firm capabilities, and consumer orientation shape corporate environmental behavior. Externally, national institutions, stakeholder pressures, international agreements, levels of economic development, and corruption influence whether MNCs produce downward or upward environmental convergence.

Chapter 9 examines how international public policy affects climate-related investment risks. It focuses on two key mechanisms: international climate agreements (ICAs), such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, and climate-oriented foreign aid. The chapter analyzes how participation in ICAs and the receipt of climate aid influence investor behavior, asking whether these forms of international engagement moderate the negative relationship between climate risk and foreign direct investment observed in earlier chapters. Empirical findings indicate that both ICA membership and climate aid inflows significantly reassure foreign investors by signaling host countries’ access to resources and their commitment to managing climate vulnerabilities. The chapter also highlights several limitations of ICAs and climate aid before offering suggestions to improve their effectiveness.

This chapter evaluates the efficacy of Emulated Guardians, focusing on the EU’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) and Meta’s Oversight Board, using criteria adapted from Peter Cane’s administrative law framework: rules, authority, and culture. It argues that neither body currently functions as a truly effective adjudicatory overseer of corporate power due to weak mandates and structural limitations. These shortcomings reflect a broader challenge of emulative institutions: they replicate formal structures from public law but lack the enabling sociopolitical contexts—such as democratic rulemaking or judicial authority—that underpin their role models. However, the chapter also identifies the performative potential of these bodies. By leveraging adjudicative symbolism and public expectations, both ODSs and the Oversight Board can incrementally expand their normative authority. This process, while slow and fraught, mirrors historical adjudicative strategies seen in domestic and international courts. Moreover, early practices show potential for innovation, such as integrating large language models into decision-making. By analyzing rules, authority, and culture, the chapter highlights the ambivalence of Emulated Guardians: while they risk becoming ceremonial “accountability theater,” they may also lay the groundwork for meaningful control over powerful private organizations. These findings have implications far beyond content moderation, applying to emerging governance challenges in AI, biotechnology, and other globalized sectors.

How can we regulate private power in a globalized, digitized world where state-centered sovereignty, territorial boundaries, and traditional legal frameworks fall short? This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, its arguments, methodology, and contributions, addressing the urgent need for accountability mechanisms to tame the increasingly unilateral global governance by a handful of corporations. Focusing on content moderation, it examines two key case studies: the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Meta’s Oversight Board. Both exemplify “emulation,” where public law mechanisms, particularly constitutional and administrative, are adapted to private governance.

Analyzing these “Emulated Guardians”–institutions borrowing the legitimacy of courts while operating in private or hybrid contexts–this book highlights their reliance on performativity and public perception to assert authority. Through interdisciplinary analysis, empirical findings, and expert interviews, the book reveals the ambivalent outcomes of emulation: promising tools for accountability yet sometimes lacking practical efficacy. Ultimately, this work frames these mechanisms as harbingers of new accountability norms, arguing that governance in the digital age demands not only novel institutions but also robust public engagement. It situates these developments within broader debates about power, legitimacy, and the evolving role of public law ideals in globalized, networked environments.

This chapter reflects on the future of governance in an era where corporate-driven, private arrangements increasingly dominate key sectors, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and beyond. While public power still contributes through research funding and normative frameworks, the sheer scale and speed of private actors often surpass traditional regulatory capacities. Governance today rests to a considerable extent with the internal factions of corporations—engineers, compliance teams, and public relations—who shape techno-normative frameworks with little public accountability. The chapter argues that governance by emulation offers a pragmatic, albeit imperfect, path forward. Emulating public law principles—such as accountability, self-governance, and due process—into private contexts can inject public-minded values into profit-driven structures. However, traditional private law mechanisms, such as contracts and fiduciary duties, need repurposing to address the scale and public significance of corporate governance. Similarly, the role of infrastructure, code, and technical frameworks in shaping governance must be acknowledged alongside conventional normative tools. While these developments hold both promise and peril, they also mirror the incremental evolution of liberal public institutions. By embedding public law ideals into emerging governance constellations, we may foster accountability structures capable of addressing the complexities of modern global power dynamics—marking a critical step toward a more balanced and responsive future governance framework.

These conclusions do not intend to summarize and even less to close the debate but instead to revert to the main issues addressed during the conference and maybe identify further issues for research. All contributors agree that not only a discussion on democracy and representation in and by international organisations is not purely speculative or theoretical, but that it seems necessary today. Despite this, contributors are not all in agreement on the need to use the concept of representation when discussing democratization of international organizations. Some question the link between democracy and representation, or whether using representative systems is even feasible in international organizations. This, in turn, leads to the various definitions of the concept of representation in political science and in law. A multiple international representation system (MIRS) as proposed by Besson and Marti is based on a strict concept of democratic representation and contrasts with other more flexible concepts such as ‘descriptive’ or ‘mimetic’ representation. In the end, the chapters address the merits of various systems, including in existing processes of global governance, for further democratizing international organisations.

This chapter examines the relationship between trade and sustainable development, including its developmental dimension. It argues that trade policy and international trade institutions must be integrated into broader international efforts to promote sustainable development. This requires an end to the siloed treatment of trade and other policy areas. It also requires a more holistic approach to international law-making, including greater cooperation among international organisations and a willingness to make trade-offs between competing goals. Finally, it requires a recognition of the different preferences of rich and poor countries and a willingness to address the power imbalances that exist in the global trading system.

This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

The book examines the various arenas in which actors are making – and breaking – the rules in business and human rights. It advances a framework for analysing these developments by adapting the liberal institutionalist concept of legalisation articulated in Kenneth Abbott et al.’s article ‘The Concept of Legalization’. Applied in the transnational context, the classic framework appears incomplete: it omits a crucial dimension – implementation – which operates alongside obligation, precision and delegation. The empirical chapters in this book reveal that efforts toward implementation are often pursued with the aim of strengthening one or more of the other dimensions over time. In such cases, actors play the long game: they may accept lower levels of obligation, precision or delegation in the short term, anticipating that early attention to implementation will enhance these dimensions in the longer run. Beyond business and human rights, this revised framework may also illuminate regulatory dynamics in transnational fields such as climate governance, national security, and anti-trafficking.