Private regulators have acquired a prominent rule-making role in domains as diverse as product manufacturing, sustainability and finance. To a large extent, these bodies determine the requirements for products to be 'safe or 'sustainable', or requirements for financial institutions with a profound impact on systemic risk. The centrality of these private regulatory bodies does not seem to be affected by regulatory failures and crises, some of which they instigated. Rather, private regulators acquire increasing power and influence in the aftermath of regulatory crises, and increasingly escape supervision of States and international organisations.
The REVEAL project studies factors internal and external to these bodies that contribute to the evolution and dominant role of private regulation in several key domains. The project aims to collect comprehensive empirical evidence about factors in these bodies' composition, rules and procedures, as well as legal requirements across jurisdictions and legal areas that contribute to their resilience in spite of crises. The goal of REVEAL is to shed new light over the resilience of private regulators, with the aim to design novel forms of public control and supervision over these bodies. The societal impact of this work cannot be underscored enough: While there is variation in the interaction dynamics between private regulotory bodies and State regulators and supervisors, the strategies of influence and lobby have common characteristics, thereby allowing systematization of the political economy of public-private interaction. Taming and steering private regulatory power for the common good can indeed make a difference in addressing economic inequality and other societal challenges.
More specifically, in its discovery phase, the REVEAL team mapped the private standard-setting ecosystem in product safety, sustainability and finance mainly via desk research as well as interviews (semistructured, elite etc), field observation and surveys. The REVEAL team members collected empirical data on the origin, structure and change of such bodies; and achieved significant progress in identifying means and strategies that such private regulators use to absorb internal and external crises and similar episodes overtime. In the theory-building phase, the REVEAL team used the empirical date collected to substantiate a new theory of private collective action that is built around crisis events. We identified instances, where economic activism by private standard-setters was not as aggressive as we thought: rather it was more nuanced in that new tasks were handed over to private bodies in the aftermath of the crisis due to systematic lobbying efforts, active leadership, or procrastination by public regulators. Still, identifying the importance of such efforts externally as well as internal organizational traits (flexibility, active leadership, heterogeneity of membership) for the resilience and evolution of these private standard-setters was a significant contribution of the project to the existing work on the regulation and governance of private rule-makers.
