The risk of regulatory ritualism: Proposals for a treaty on business and human rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This working paper is the first to analyse whether insights into problems of "regulatory ritualism" might inform contemporary debate on the merits and content of any new treatybased mechanism on the human rights responsibilities of business and financial actors. In 2015 a controversial inter-governmental working group held its first meeting towards negotiating a future treaty. However, treaty proponents have not tied their arguments to any theory of regulatory effectiveness, nor addressed empirical arguments questioning the effectiveness of human rights treaties. This is problematic since some treaty proposals raise the spectre of state "compliance" patterns marked by formalistic, empty rituals of verification. In setting up that possibility, the paper explores the status of debate on the merits or viability of a "treaty path", canvassing the range of treaty options being proposed. Treaty opponents may over-state aspects of their case, such as the opportunity costs of drawn-out negotiations. Yet even assuming consensus is possible, treaty proponents have not shown how state acceptance of binding treaty obligations would necessarily address the "governance gap" here. Proponents may confuse regulatory aims with the means for achieving these, placing undue faith in the preventative and remedial potential of binding international legal instruments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.053 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.031 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".