IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/harjfk/rwp15-045.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises: Normative Innovations and Implementation Challenges

Author

Listed:
  • Ruggie, John

    (Harvard University)

  • Nelson, Tamaryn

    (Harvard University)

Abstract

Business and human rights became an increasingly prominent feature on the international agenda in the 1990s. Global markets widened and deepened significantly as a result of trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and off-shoring production as well as financial centers. The rights of multinational corporations to operate globally became legally enshrined in a vast expansion of bilateral investment treaties and investment chapters of bilateral and regional free trade agreements, as well as a new international regime protecting intellectual property. Multinational corporations did well subsequently, and so too did people and countries that were able to take advantage of the opportunities created by this transformative process.But others were less fortunate. Global social and environmental protections lagged behind, and domestic safety nets, where they existed at all, began to fray. Income inequalities began to rise. International attempts to regulate the conduct of multinational corporations, going back to the 1970s, continued to fail. Sweatshops, displaced communities, child labor, forced and bonded labor, corporate security providers raping and sometimes killing demonstrators or mere bystanders, are among the abuses that were amply documented. What requires better documentation, if these global imbalances are to be corrected, are the means by which the global and local communities have sought to redress the imbalances, and how they might be improved. This paper takes one small step in that direction. It analyzes the first and still one of the very few international mechanisms that governments have established enabling individuals, communities or their representatives to bring complaints against multinational corporations: the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises ("Guidelines") promulgated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Our interest in the Guidelines in this paper is two-fold. First, we want to identify patterns of use over time in order to better understand them. Second, we want to see what if any difference exists in these patterns since the endorsement by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2011 of the Guiding Principles on Human Rights, core elements of which were incorporated into the 2011 OECD Guidelines revision. Finally, we offer some concluding thoughts about how this complaints mechanism should be strengthened.

Suggested Citation

  • Ruggie, John & Nelson, Tamaryn, 2015. "Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises: Normative Innovations and Implementation Challenges," Working Paper Series rwp15-045, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
  • Handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp15-045
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/citation.aspx?PubId=9805&type=WPN
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michele Ford & Michael Gillan & Htwe Htwe Thein, 2020. "Supranational grievance mechanisms and firmā€level employment relations," Industrial Relations Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(4), pages 262-282, July.
    2. Carolei Domenico, 2022. "Accountability beyond Corporations: The Applicability of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises to Non-profit Organisations," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 13(1), pages 31-47, January.
    3. Melo, Paulo Thiago Nunes Bezerra de & Bellen, Hans Michael van, 2022. "Institutional dimension for sustainable development: the relationship of organic and conventional cotton farming with government," Revista de Economia e Sociologia Rural (RESR), Sociedade Brasileira de Economia e Sociologia Rural, vol. 60(1), January.
    4. Axel Marx & Franz Ebert & Nicolas Hachez, 2017. "Dispute Settlement for Labour Provisions in EU Free Trade Agreements: Rethinking Current Approaches," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 5(4), pages 49-59.
    5. Axel Marx & Jan Wouters, 2017. "Rule Intermediaries in Global Labor Governance," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 670(1), pages 189-206, March.
    6. Michele Ford & Michael Gillan, 2021. "Power resources and supranational mechanisms: The global unions and the OECD Guidelines," European Journal of Industrial Relations, , vol. 27(3), pages 307-325, September.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp15-045. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ksharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.