Contested Coexistence: Transnational Private Governance and Public Regulatory Reform in Global Value Chains

Abstract

This article examines how a transnational coalition of NGOs, unions, and labor rights organizations drove both private and public regulation on gender‐based violence and harassment in Lesotho's garment sector, and how the resulting regulatory systems coexist despite ongoing tension between them. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, stakeholder interviews, and archival analysis, we show that the coalition leveraged reputational and diplomatic pressures, enabled by Lesotho's structural dependence on the United States as both buyer and donor, to secure the Lesotho Agreement and subsequent public regulatory reforms. The same dependencies that enabled these reforms also generated sustained tensions once the regulatory systems were in place. We term this dynamic contested coexistence —a governance configuration in which a supplying country's structural dependence on a buyer country forecloses rejection of a private regulatory system while constraining open endorsement of it—and identify it as a new form of private‐public interaction within Cashore et al.'s framework.