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Auditors of global supply chains play an influential role in determining what it means for manufacturing facilities to comply with both transnational standards as well as national and international labour laws. They exercise this role at the interface between the local context of labourers in a workplace governed by local and national laws, and the transnational context of private standards intended to govern global supply chains. This article utilises the concept of translocal legality to explore how auditors develop and deploy their authority and technical expertise to interpret questions about compliance with legal and private norms in global supply chains. It illustrates how auditors transform what it means to be compliant with legal requirements, and in doing so creates a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable types of risk to workers’ safety in the context of economic globalization.

This article draws on the notion of co-production to assess the construction oftransnational narratives in climate change litigation. Using the examples ofrecent cases from the Netherlands, Norway, and Ireland, the article identifies acommon narrative regarding the temporal dimension of climate change and itsgovernance. Litigants are shown to develop a notion of urgency for nationalclimate policies with the help of symbols and discourses—including pathways,crossroads, milestones, thresholds and carbon budgets—in order to attributemeaning to complex models of the future climate, and the immediateresponsibilities of states to limit future global warming. In response, states offerdepictions of the future in which technological and economic evolutionsrender our current climate crisis less challenging and costly. This narrativeapproach helps make sense of the transnational legal strategies through whichour understanding of responsibility and climate justice is unfolding.

This article builds on the model of regulatory intermediaries by incorporating insights from the field of legal hermeneutics about the process through which the meaning of a legal rule emerges. It describes how intermediaries can take on a jurisgenerative role in the development of legal rules through their interpretation of legal rules. This role is demonstrated through an analysis of social audits from Chinese and Vietnamese factories involved in the Fair Labor Association (FLA). The analysis illustrates how the integration of fundamental labor rights into the FLA's private Code of Conduct requires auditors to develop new interpretations of the Freedom of Association as a result of uncertainties and contradictions between legal requirements at various levels, as well as with the FLA's own rules. Through this empirical analysis, the article contributes to the literature by identifying regulatory intermediaries' jurisgenerative capacities when they monitor fundamental labor rights referenced by private governance instruments. It further highlights why legal and regulatory governance scholars need to consider the transformative effects that transnational private labor governance may have on international labor law.

This introduction explores the underlying question addressed in each of the contributions to this special issue: what impact does the use of general administrative governance principles and processes by hybrid and transnational private regulatory bodies have on ‘transnational administrative law doctrine’? The importance of this inquiry arises out of the growing role that such regulatory bodies play, despite their lack of formal competence, in introducing principles and procedures of general administrative nature into their respective sector. The hypothesis is that these ‘horizontal’ – due both to the absence of formal hierarchy as well as their cross-sector applicability – administrative norms and procedures undergo transformations as the regulatory bodies formulate them for their particular fields. By pursuing this hypothesis across a number of different case studies, the contributions to this special issue develop both transnational private regulation and global administrative law scholarship by mapping normative transformations that occur in their mutual intersections.