Concerning gold, Tiffany, Wal-Mart and governance: How does variation amongst firms affect the regulatory capacity of nonstate actors?

Private actors are creating global governance through their interactions and this raises
concerns about the possibility and implications of a movement from public to private authority in the international sphere. If these emerging nonstate arrangements do reflect such a movement, it is paramount to ask what these institutions can hope to achieve. This essay will investigate how variation amongst business actors, even within the same industry, affects the governance arrangements that emerge. This facilitates a preliminary evaluation of what the regulatory capacities of nonstate actors are in the seeming absence of direct state participation. Findings from a firm-level analysis of the US jewellery industry, as the targeted node of the global gold supply chain, are presented to evaluate the argument and investigate the potential and limitations of nonstate governance.