Local Grounding of Transnational Private Governance Authority: Translation, Contestation, Legitimation and Communities of Practice

Scholars emphasise the constitutive ambiguity of transnational private standards and the importance of global-local interactions in their implementation. Yet how this ambiguity and these interactions shape the legitimation of transnational private governance, especially in the norm formation phase, remain open questions. The conceptual metaphor of ‘grounding’ offers a promising perspective on these questions. This article conceptualises the grounding of transnational private governance in terms of practices of translation by which transnational standard-setting is grounded in receptive local contexts; practices of contestation by which it runs aground on local resistance; and communities of practice that shape the normative grounds for legitimate standard-setting authority. An illustrative example of local Colombian reactions to the development of the global social responsibility guide ISO 26000 suggests that a basic principle of private standardisation, that standards are developed through a consensus process in which all concerned interests are effectively represented, is not as important to the legitimation of standards as many suppose, and that membership in two overlapping communities of practice—standardisation and corporate social responsibility—explains why actors legitimise standard-setters that do not fulfill a legitimacy criterion they purport to consider crucial.