The complicity of transnational business in human rights abuse often appears intractable. Loss of land and livelihoods, harsh working conditions resulting in illness, young women working in forced labour conditions, workers punished for trying to unionise and address meagre wages and precarious contracts – all remain pervasive characteristics of many multinational business operations and supply chains, despite widespread recognition of the scale and significance of these problems. International agreement on appropriate institutional responses remains elusive, as governments, businesses and civil society organisations around the world have often become trapped in highly polarised debates over how to regulate the human rights impacts of transnational business activity. And while workers and communities have sometimes achieved small, localised victories in such struggles for human rights, recurring patterns of business-related human rights violations persist.

Yet occasionally there is a sense of excitement and a glimmer of hope that intractable obstacles may in some way be overcome. One such moment emerged in 2005, when the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights appointed Harvard Professor John Ruggie – championed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan – to the daunting task of navigating a new pathway through this political stalemate. His main brief was to clarify the responsibilities of both states and private business enterprises to protect the human rights of people adversely affected by business activity. In 2011, after six years of work and extensive dialogue with businesses, governments, civil society organisations and legal and corporate responsibility professionals around the world, Ruggie and his team produced the UN’s long-awaited Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). These sought to steer a pragmatic new pathway between the often bitterly opposed advocates of voluntary versus mandatory approaches to business-related human rights regulation. The principles were received in many quarters with enthusiasm and renewed hope. At last it seemed that some broad-based agreement might be forged about how to strengthen human rights protections for people adversely affected by transnational business activity and how to provide meaningful avenues of human rights redress.

Attracting particular interest amongst some human rights defenders was the third of the three central pillars of Ruggie’s Guiding Principles framework, which related to access to remedy – a principle requiring that people whose human rights have been violated have ‘practical and meaningful access to a procedure that is capable of ending and repairing the effects of the violation’ in a timely and affordable way. Remedy may take a wide variety of forms, including apologies, restitution, rehabilitation, financial or non-financial compensation or punitive sanctions (UN OHCHR 2011 p. 27). While many human rights advocates had long placed their hope primarily in strengthened judicial avenues of remedy, Ruggie questioned the wisdom of such an approach – observing that the practical ability of workers or communities to access judicial means of remedy was in fact most severely limited precisely where the need for remedy was greatest. As Ruggie highlighted, workers and communities suffering human rights abuses often face both legal barriers to pursuing judicial redress beyond the boundaries of national jurisdictions and severe practical barriers linked to under-resourced or corrupt processes of state regulation and redress within national regulatory systems. As a result, a narrow focus on pursuing strengthened government regulation and judicial redress could not facilitate reliable and accessible pathways to protecting human rights.

Instead, Ruggie and his team argued that the answer to the problem lay in part in investing renewed energy in exploring the distinctive capacities and limitations of non-judicial mechanisms (NJMs) of redress alongside judicial processes. These are institutional mechanisms that are mandated to receive complaints and resolve disputes with regard to alleged human rights violations, but (as their name suggests) they are not empowered to produce binding adjudications. They include such things as accountability mechanisms of international development banks, complaints systems of multi-stakeholder regulatory initiatives (MSIs) and accountability mechanisms linked to codes of expected good business practice promoted by national and intergovernmental organisations.Footnote ¹ What made NJMs attractive is that they were seen as being flexible, readily accessible and politically realistic. Some claims for human rights redress could, it was hoped, be resolved more easily through NJMs without the need to incur the costs and delays of pursuing judicial redress. And in cases where judicial redress was theoretically ideal yet practically inaccessible, non-judicial redress mechanisms could at least provide a second-best yet nonetheless useful avenue for pursuing some kind of redress.

For a time, Ruggie’s NJMs were enthusiastically embraced by many governments, businesses and civil society organisations. Supporters argued that NJMs could have ‘a legitimate and compelling role to play’ in addressing human rights-related disputes between companies and affected people (Rees Reference Rees2010 p. 22), either as standalone mechanisms or as means of complementing and supporting state-based regulation (Lukas et al. Reference Lukas, Linder, Kutrzeba and Sprenger2016 p. 326; Rees Reference Rees2010).

It was not long, however, before longstanding scepticism of non-binding approaches to business regulation bubbled back to the surface, as activism and scholarship began to scrutinise NJMs and found them wanting. Critics argued that NJMs are voluntary regulatory instruments operating in the face of huge power imbalances between multinational companies (MNCs) and marginalised workers and communities. Critical observers pointed to an array of instances where non-judicial approaches failed to protect rights or broader conceptions of justice, proved incapable of countering power imbalances in bargaining processes (Coumans Reference Coumans2012; Fiss Reference Fiss1984) or inappropriately individualised recurring grievances, thereby inhibiting promotion of systemic change (Capulong Reference Capulong2012; Edwards Reference Edwards1986). A rising chorus of critical reports by non-government organisations (NGOs) have subsequently reinforced such concerns, finding shortcomings in the performance of non-judicial processes to be pervasive (see, for example, Accountability Counsel et al. 2016; Daniel et al. Reference Daniel, Genovese, van Huijstee and Singh2015). In short, many now believe that NJMs have proven – as some suspected all along – to be offering false promises of remedy that such inherently voluntary mechanisms were never capable of delivering.

Nevertheless, non-judicial approaches to redress have continued to be widely advocated under the umbrella of the influential UNGPs framework, and debates over their value persist and intensify. Critics of NJMs have increasingly demanded more assertive ‘hard law’ approaches to regulation, variously advocating strengthened legislative or administrative mechanisms backed directly by state authority at the national level and renewed efforts to negotiate an international treaty on the topic of business and human rights (Altholz & Sullivan Reference Altholz and Sullivan2017). In June 2014, the UN Human Rights Council established an intergovernmental working group to draft such a treaty, and at the time of writing that group is continuing to negotiate regarding the proposed text.Footnote ² But even as an expanding coalition of government and civil society organisations promoting more ‘binding’ approaches to regulation and redress gathers strength, these hard law regulatory agendas themselves continue to face significant political obstacles. There is a powerful sense that the longstanding polarisation of debate between voluntary and mandatory approaches is regathering strength, impeding an agreed path through the impasse.

This book grew out of that context. We began our research in 2010, shortly before the UN released its UNGPs. Our attention was drawn towards both the initial waves of optimism and the subsequent intensification of critical commentary on NJMs. We wanted to explore whether NJMs were largely worthless as their critics claimed or worse still, if they were impotent distractions that undermined the development of more serious agendas of legal regulation. Or, if NJMs really can make meaningful contributions to redressing human rights violations linked to transnational business activity, we wanted to know how and when they can do this. These questions lie at the heart of this book. We ask:

1. 1. What impact can NJM interventions have on community and worker struggles to achieve remedy for human rights grievances associated with transnational business activity?

2. 2. To the extent that NJM interventions can enable or empower these struggles (if at all), how and under what conditions can they do so?

3. 3. If NJMs can make useful contributions to facilitating human rights redress, how might they be better designed and operated to achieve these ends in varied country and sectoral contexts? And when, how and for what purposes should community and worker representatives engage with them?

We understood that to really answer these questions, we needed to go to the coalface. Despite fervently held views on both sides of the debate about NJMs, there was a striking absence of ‘on the ground’ empirical evidence that would enable a systematic evaluation of the potential and limitations of non-judicial approaches. We therefore carried out a major empirical investigation of non-judicial human rights grievance, which entailed a five-year period of intensive research spanning human rights grievances located in two countries (India and Indonesia) and linked to business activity in three economic sectors (mineral resource extraction and processing, agribusiness and related land-based sectors and apparel). And we conducted interviews and focus groups with over a thousand participants in ten human rights grievance struggles in these countries and sectors to provide a systematic body of evidence about the operation and effects of NJMs.

Drawing on insights from this large-scale empirical study, we argue that NJMs are indeed seriously limited in their ability to deliver adequate human rights redress but also that a comprehensive rejection of NJMs would nonetheless be a mistake. Business impunity for the damage businesses do to human rights understandably evokes strong responses and a search for the solution. But there is no silver bullet. Such a quest is futile since all initiatives enter a crowded economic and political space – what we refer to in this book as a field of struggle – in which the ability of workers and communities to access human rights redress depends on the interplay between many different actors and institutions, who wrestle to influence the outcomes of human rights disputes.

Within such struggles to control the outcomes of human rights grievance claims, the balance of power is almost always stacked against the marginalised workers and communities most vulnerable to human rights abuse. This is true not only in relation to non-judicial systems of human rights redress but also with respect to the many state-controlled processes of regulation and redress with which non-judicial redress processes coexist and interact. Within this wider business and human rights regulatory ecosystem involving both judicial and non-judicial institutions, NJMs can 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 interacting with them – providing entry points through which workers and communities can sometimes mobilise additional resources or sources of leverage in support of their struggles for redress.

Thus while our findings challenge any inflated hopes that NJMs might provide standalone means of facilitating human rights remedy, obviating the need for strengthened legal regulation, they nonetheless reaffirm one central proposition advanced by John Ruggie in his advocacy of non-judicial approaches: the view that binary debates around NJMs or treaties and hard law are fundamentally misguided. Successful redress for marginalised actors almost always requires a multi-pronged approach, involving economic and political actors that may independently and interdependently apply pressure in support of human rights redress. Efforts to secure an effective web of pressure in support of redress can benefit from both non-judicial and judicial avenues for redress, alongside multiple sources of economic and political leverage at international, national and subnational scales. In light of these findings, the book argues for a responsive approach to NJM institutional design and regulatory strategy – one in which NJMs are utilised more explicitly as part of a wider field of struggle as a means of counterbalancing some of the entrenched inequalities that underpin recurring patterns of human rights grievances around the world.

Conceptualising Non-judicial Redress Mechanisms and Their Effects

Somewhat paradoxically, although impassioned debates have surrounded the merits and shortcomings of non-judicial redress mechanisms, there is surprisingly little consensus within such debates regarding what NJMs actually are.Footnote ³ Clarification of how we conceptualise NJMs is therefore a crucial first step before we can proceed any further with our analysis.

A broadly shared understanding of NJMs is that they are mandated to receive complaints and resolve disputes but not empowered to produce binding adjudications. Yet this common definition glosses over the broad range of possible candidates that fit the description of an NJM. Although established debates between judicial and non-judicial approaches to regulation and remedy often categorise non-judicial grievance-handling mechanisms within a single umbrella category referred to as NJMs, the reality is that such NJMs are highly diverse in form, composition and institutional setting. They can take the form of independent accountability mechanisms associated with international financial institutions lending to the private sector (Altholz & Sullivan Reference Altholz and Sullivan2017; Scheltema Reference Scheltema2013); mechanisms established by home country governments to receive complaints about the conduct of companies domiciled in their jurisdiction, such as National Contact Points (NCPs) created under the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct (OECD Guidelines; OECD 2023); or grievance mechanisms associated with transnational multi-stakeholder standard-setting bodies such as the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) or Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO); or those multi-stakeholder schemes focused on specific issues and locations, such as the Freedom of Association Protocol (FOA Protocol) established in the Indonesian apparel sector. Some NJMs came into being as a result of very specific past grievances, while others were conceived as broader initiatives to improve the behaviour of companies in particular industries or locations or were created as part of broader regulatory architectures to govern corporate social responsibility (CSR) or business and human rights agendas. Finally, NJMs can be distinguished by the scale at which they operate: local, national or transnational.

The conceptual difficulties created by such diversity are made even more slippery by the fact that any given NJM can also embody a range of contrasting, and sometimes ambiguous and contradictory, purposes and mechanisms. One important distinction centres on whether NJMs are expected to focus on addressing individual grievances (for example, by facilitating mediation of company–community disputes) or are viewed as prospective means of promoting more collective or systemic goals. A focus on individual grievances resonates in important respects with a traditional model of litigation, in the sense of being focused on specific parties, primarily retrospective in focus, and oriented towards the pursuit of definite remedies for designated complainants in response to specific alleged harms (Chayes Reference Chayes1976). In contrast, demands for collective or institutional remedies can encompass a broad range of claims, ranging from calls for a radical reorientation of the status quo, to demands for more incremental changes, or simply a more open call for institutional practices to be reformed in ways that ‘respond to previously excluded stakeholders’ (Sabel & Simon Reference Sabel and Simon2004 p. 1056). Non-judicial mechanisms also differ in important ways with regard to the breadth of their mandates, the formality of their structures and procedures, the ways they conceptualise relevant forms of harm or grievance and the remedies they offer – ranging from quasi-adjudicative processes involving investigation, audit or authoritative determination of a final settlement based on agreed standards, to consensual facilitation of dialogue between disputing parties or provision of broader capacity-building, learning and regulatory functions designed to prevent ongoing, systemic patterns of harm. Such complexities and ambiguities in NJM design are often further complicated by the contrasting purposes towards which various actors seek to harness them in the course of contests over human rights grievance. In some cases, disputes concerning the purposes and scope of grievance-handling mechanisms can lead to contestation regarding which institutional mechanisms can even properly be considered grievance-handling mechanisms in the first place.

Such tensions and ambiguities regarding the character and purposes of NJMs have significant implications for our analysis. First, they have implications for the boundaries of specific grievance disputes. Second, they have important implications for the way NJMs are designed, resourced and used in specific cases. Third, different claims or interpretations about the purposes and boundaries of NJMs influence which actors are able to dominate NJM processes and outcomes and which parties are even recognised as legitimate participants in these processes in the first place.

Recognising this diversity and contestation regarding the nature and role of NJMs, we adopt a broad conceptualisation of NJMs that aims to include those mechanisms that workers or communities have instrumentalised in pursuit of redress, even where the mechanisms did not self-identify primarily as grievance-handling mechanisms. Consequently we have included in our study some NJMs that may not normally be considered human rights ‘grievance mechanisms’, according to a narrower definition focused on resolution of conflict as a primary rather than ancillary purpose of the institution. Although our conceptualisation is thus expansive with regard to the character and purposes of NJMs that we include, we narrow our focus with respect to the geographical scope of the NJMs’ operation. Reflecting our specific interest in NJMs as instruments of transnational business regulation, we focus exclusively on NJMs in which transnational actors play a central role.

Persistent ambiguity and contestation regarding the core purposes of NJMs have important implications also for how the effects (or effectiveness) of NJMs can be conceptualised and evaluated. Some dimensions of NJM effectiveness are straightforward, insofar as they are grounded in a broadly shared understanding of NJMs as oriented towards facilitating human rights redress for specific individuals or groups. Considered from this perspective, NJMs can be understood as more or less useful or effective to the extent that they: a) facilitate redress outcomes that are objectively ‘rights-compatible’ (consistent with international and national human rights laws and regulations) and b) are subjectively judged by communities and workers to provide useful support in helping them to achieve their desired forms of human rights redress.

Evaluation of NJM effectiveness becomes more complex, however, when we attempt also to evaluate indirect or systemic impacts of NJMs, for example, in the form of influence over changes to government or business policies or practices that prevent or mitigate recurring patterns of human rights violations. Evaluating the contributions of NJMs to these broader processes of systemic change is methodologically challenging given the complex processes of causality involved. Nonetheless, we seek to capture such effects to the extent possible through also considering factors such as whether specific companies increased efforts to respect human rights because of an NJM process, whether the outcomes improved the human rights situation more widely, whether the outcome helped prevent or reduce future grievances and harms and whether the outcomes contributed to effective remedy through interactions with other judicial and non-judicial mechanisms that stakeholders were engaged in. By considering such multidimensional effects of NJM interventions, we can go beyond a straightforward assessment of the extent to which NJMs are successful in fulfilling their own goals or mandates in relation to human rights compliance to also explore the capacity of workers and communities to harness NJMs in support of their own redress goals, even where these differ to some extent from the formal mandates of the NJMs.

Investigating NJMs Empirically: Ten Stories of Human Rights Grievance

Just as diversity in the conceptualisation and design of NJMs presented challenges for defining the scope of our study, so too the diversity of ways in which workers and communities attempted to use NJMs in individual cases had implications for our empirical investigation of the effects of NJM interventions on access to human rights remedy, particularly concerning our methodological approach to defining, selecting, empirically investigating and comparing case studies.

On the one hand, we wanted to design our empirical research in a way that would allow us to study individual grievances in depth, thus enabling us to explore the complex pathways through which NJMs have sometimes supported worker and community remedy within individual cases – or failed to do so. At the same time, it was important to compare grievance processes across varied country and sectoral contexts to understand the wide diversity of experiences and outcomes linked to NJM interventions in human rights disputes and to make sense of how varied sectoral and country contexts enable or constrain the effectiveness of such redress processes (Rihoux & Ragin Reference Rihoux and Ragin2008).

To balance these central concerns, we organised empirical data collection and analysis around a diverse selection of ten in-depth case studies, each of which tracked a specific story of human rights grievance and efforts to use NJMs as a tool for accessing redress. We focused primarily on instances in which communities sought actively to engage with a non-judicial body in order to resolve a grievance. At the same time, we sought to capture cases in which communities affected by transnational business activity faced significant barriers to accessing NJMs that were theoretically available to them.

Our starting point for conceptualising the boundaries of each case was relatively straightforward: each case was focused on a particular human rights dispute (or connected series of disputes) between a specific company and the workers or communities affected in some significant way by the company’s activities.Footnote ⁴ Beyond this central anchorage point, however, the boundaries of a ‘case’ were often blurred. Although each case was clearly anchored in an individual grievance, the spatial and temporal boundaries of each case were broader. Each case was spatially constituted at the multiple subnational, national and transnational scales over which the grievance was contested and temporally constituted around the dynamics of the particular grievance. Most of our cases extended over relatively long timeframes (several years), during which the specific redress claims taken to an NJM at one point in time intersected and became entwined with broader grievances within wider social and policy fields. The spatial and temporal boundaries of each case were thus fluid – driven by changing patterns of claim-making and contestation and often evolving to encompass an interacting and contested array of individual and systemic claims (Haines & Macdonald Reference Haines and Macdonald2020). Further, although we deliberately chose cases where the relevant grievance involved human rights violations, in each case the claimants had a range of grievances, not all of which fitted neatly within a human rights frame, and we also wanted to attend to how the grievance process impacted on these wider concerns. In relation to each of these ten grievance case studies, we then focused on the operation of specific transnational non-judicial complaint-handling systems involved in that case; in some cases this was one NJM, in some others it was more than one. These NJM interventions always interacted with other government and civil society processes through which grievances were contested – further blurring the boundaries of the ‘case’.

To enable comparison of case studies across varied economic sectors, these ten grievance case studies were chosen to focus on grievances involving three different sectors (mineral resource extraction and processing, agribusiness and related land-based sectors and apparel), each of which is characterised by highly globalised production and trading systems, widely recognised human rights risks and active presence of both state and civil society actors engaged in contesting regulatory processes. In the apparel sector, we focused on grievances associated with freedom of association and precarious employment. In mining, we focused on violations of health and livelihood rights and on physical safety and economic and cultural rights stemming from displacement of communities from land. In the agribusiness sector, we focused on labour rights abuses and violations due to land displacement and environmental damage. These reflected some of the most widespread and entrenched problems in their respective sectors (Ruggie Reference Ruggie2008).

To enable comparison between different country contexts, we selected case studies located in two countries: India and Indonesia. Both countries had significant transnational business activity across our three focal sectors, strong links to international investors and supply chains, and while also having varied market conditions, civic organising capacity and political features of the regulatory environment in which NJMs sought to intervene. Studying cases based in India and Indonesia also enabled us to explore diverse subnational contexts, given the scale and plurality of both countries and varied political economies of production and regulation across the focal sectors. At the same time, selection of cases in these two countries enabled us to control for alternative explanatory variables such as degrees of economic development and patterns of political stability and rule of law (both countries being middle-income, resource-dependent and with mixed democratic histories). Focusing our field research on grievance cases in these two countries was thus an important practical decision which enabled us to carry out our within-case analysis with sufficient depth and contextual knowledge, while still ensuring variation in relevant contextual factors.

In selecting the specific case studies of human rights grievance stories to focus on in these countries and sectors, we next identified individual cases of grievances in which communities had attempted to engage one or more transnational NJMs to support their redress claims. To ensure appropriate variation in NJM institutional design, our cases were selected to include the most widely used categories of NJMs (i.e., those linked to international financial institutions, home country governments, transnational multi-stakeholder governance bodies and multi-stakeholder initiatives centred in a specific host country). The NJMs we ended up examining include: the World Bank Group’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO); the NCPs associated with obligations under the OECD Guidelines; the complaints system of the RSPO, a multi-stakeholder regulatory scheme focused on the global palm oil industry; the ETI, a multi-stakeholder initiative based in the UK and covering a number of different sectors; the FOA Protocol, a small multi-stakeholder scheme focused exclusively on the apparel industry in Indonesia; the complaints procedures established by Rainforest Alliance, a global sustainability certification programme operating in a range of farm and forest-based product sectors; and the consultation and complaints procedures associated with development of a private-investor-led Reduction of Emissions through Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) forest conservation project in Indonesia. In the few instances where multiple human rights grievances had been brought to the relevant NJMs in our targeted countries and sectors, our case selection was also guided by practical considerations of information availability and company and community access.

Our empirical investigation of these ten case studies drew on a broad range of sources. Over the six years (2011–16) during which our primary data collection occurred,Footnote ⁵ we carried out 587 interviews and focus groups with 1,100 individuals. Our data collection occurred not only in producing country locations (Indonesia and India) but also at a range of international locations involved in human rights redress struggles, encompassing investor, consumer and producing country jurisdictions and sites of international NJMs. Interviews and field visits were supplemented by relevant secondary research, including online media articles, civil society reports and company websites.

We analysed each of our cases through a within-case method of qualitative analysis commonly referred to as process tracing or causal process analysis. This approach aims to ‘generate and analyse data on the causal mechanisms, or processes, events, actions, expectations and other intervening variables that link putative causes to observed effects’ (Bennett & George Reference Bennett and George1997 p. 5; see also Bennett Reference Bennett, Box‐Steffensmeier, Brady and Collier2008; Collier Reference Collier2011). This enabled us to observe and document the micro-social processes underpinning the intervention of NJMs in each of our cases, the behavioural responses of participants and associated causal processes of change (Checkel Reference Checkel2006; Gerring Reference Gerring2004; Petersen Reference Petersen, Bowen and Petersen1999). Our comparative analysis of similarities and differences in the operation of NJMs across varied country and sectoral contexts adopted a narrative approach to cross-case comparison in which we searched for patterns in combinations of explanatory conditions producing varied outcomes.Footnote ⁶ This enabled us to identify similarities and differences between cases with regard to the role of both NJM institutional design and broader features of political and socio-economic contexts that influenced processes of redress.

This overall approach to defining, selecting, investigating and comparing case studies generated a rich body of empirical evidence involving very different workers, communities and non-judicial grievance mechanisms. This enabled us to ground the book’s argument and conclusions in both the complexities and contingencies of the human rights struggles experienced by specific communities and groups of workers and a broader big-picture view of the complex regulatory fields within which the community, business and government actors involved in human rights grievance disputes struggle to shape contested redress outcomes.

Elaborating Our Argument: The Structure of the Book

Our effort to bring together a strong feel for the complexities of on-the-ground human rights struggles involving particular NJMs while also developing a cross-case analysis of larger patterns of success and failure across many different NJMs and contexts directed our organisation of the chapters that follow.

We begin in Chapter 1 by laying out the book’s ten in-depth case studies of business-related human rights grievances. This provides a contextual understanding of the process and outcomes of each of these grievance cases and the sectoral and country contexts in which they played out. For each case, we also identify the aims of community and worker groups concerning both their specific grievances and goals relating to broader systemic change. While some groups sought to improve working conditions or pursue compensation for past wrongs, others attempted to block planned business projects or to create pressure for systemic policy changes that could prevent recurring patterns of human rights abuse. This brief journey through our ten grievance case stories illuminates not only the magnitude of the obstacles that confront workers and communities seeking to bring grievance claims but also significant variation between cases in the degree to which NJMs were able to provide at least some degree of support for worker and community claims, in interaction with other claim-making processes.

Our analysis then examines how the institutional design of NJMs contributes to shaping redress outcomes. In both academic and policy-oriented debates surrounding non-judicial redress, emphasis has often been placed on the primacy of institutional design as a decisive factor in determining the effects of NJM interventions. Chapter 2 elaborates our conceptual understanding of such an institutional design perspective and identifies the key elements of NJM institutional design that are widely viewed as playing a decisive role in enabling or constraining the effectiveness of non-judicial redress mechanisms in supporting worker and community redress. Chapter 3 then explores the ways in which these core elements of institutional design are reflected in the ‘actually existing’ features of the seven transnational NJMs that were used by workers and communities in our cases. This analysis assesses the relationship between core features of institutional design and the impact of each NJM’s interventions on community and worker redress in the grievance cases we studied. Here we show that the capacity of NJMs to support worker or community redress depends not only on NJMs’ own institutional procedures but also on their ability to exert authority and leverage over business and community parties to human rights disputes, thereby influencing the wider systemic power struggles that underpin the grievance to which they respond.

Our observation that the impact of an NJM on grievance processes and outcomes depends crucially on how the NJM is drawn into the wider power struggles that underpin a given grievance provides the jumping-off point for the analysis we develop in the following chapters of the book. In Chapter 4, we introduce our key concept of a field of struggle to support clearer conceptualisation of both the shifting spatial and social boundaries of worker and community struggles over human rights grievance and the ways such struggles are shaped by wider configurations of competing power and interests in the locations and sectors in which the grievances arise. The field of struggle lens allows us to reconceptualise NJMs as elements in broader interactive governance processes, in which their effects depend importantly on how they are drawn into grievance struggles involving a range of disparate actors together with their capacity to harness diverse sources of civil society, business and state power in support of their struggles.

Chapters 5 and 6 then focus, respectively, on these sources of civil society, business and state power as a basis for understanding the interplay between varied forms of power and the diversity of redress outcomes to which NJMs contribute when they intervene in different cases. Chapter 5 highlights the importance of the strength of within-community solidarity and organising capacity, the strength of relationships with national and international allies and the capacity of communities to harness the power of business actors in support of redress. We show that NJMs were able to support redress to the extent that their interventions were able to facilitate or amplify these forms of power or otherwise to facilitate or amplify the leverage and legitimacy of community and worker redress claims. Chapter 6 then extends this analysis by exploring the conflicting roles of the state in enabling and constraining the ability of NJMs to support community struggles for redress. We show 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.

We then return to the key questions that animate the book as a whole, drawing together our core findings and reflecting on their theoretical and policy implications. Chapter 7 summarises our main findings regarding whether and under what conditions NJMs can make useful contributions to struggles for human rights redress, exploring the importance of interplay between an NJM’s own goals, capacities and institutional procedures and factors related to the capacity of NJMs to exert leverage over broader power struggles involving civil society, business and government actors involved in human rights grievance struggles. Building on these core findings, Chapter 8 considers how NJMs might be designed and operated to better support worker and community efforts to secure human rights redress. We argue for a shift in attention away from an institutional design focus on NJMs’ internal rules and procedures and towards greater emphasis on how NJMs can be utilised more explicitly as contributors to wider fields of struggle over human rights. Through developing a more ‘responsive’ approach to institutional design and regulatory strategy, which explicitly responds to wider power struggles, NJMs may yet offer some modest yet nonetheless valuable opportunities to support the struggles of marginalised workers and communities to defend their human rights in the face of pervasive business power.