Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2025
Central to all the cases studied in this book is a power struggle between business, workers and communities over rights, norms and resources. Business strategies erode community strength and divide communities and co-opt nationalist and development narratives. Business models reduce transparency and obfuscate their responsibility. Applying the fields of struggle lens, Chapter 5 explores the factors that enable some communities and workers to achieve remedy, however rare and minimal. As might be expected, success is driven by cohesion and solidarity within worker and community groups, as well as robust networks with sustained local and international networks of campaigners. Notably, the analysis also reveals that in the cases we examined where some remedy was achieved, elite business networks or key businesses in value chains espoused ethical and sustainable business norms, which were leveraged effectively by civil society networks to provide the basis for (albeit fragile) alliances between civil society and business networks against errant businesses harming communities and worker groups. Non-judicial mechanisms, as interventions in these struggles, were most helpful when they not only added their normative weight to the grievance but also reshaped the boundaries of the field to integrate and legitimate supportive allies.
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