Economic globalization and the organization of production in global production networks (GPNs) create significant challenges for the goal of securing global labour standards. The struggle for decent work is particularly strong in GPNs of the garment, apparel- and footwear industry: Highly decentralized production and labour-intensive, manual work paired with strong international market pressures make manufacturing work in this industry especially susceptible to low quality working conditions. Since the beginning of the 21st Century, the number of private governance initiatives to tackle labour violations in GPNshas grown exponentially, the extent of their impact and success however remains contested. Widely accepted on the other hand is the notion that the impact of private governance relies on factors of local embeddedness (Coe, et al. 2008). Whereas however many qualitative studies have found that the local institutional and regulatory environment ishighly decisive for a governance-program’s success, only few efforts have been made to test this impact structurally with quantitative data and in a cross-country comparison. This paper analyses the variation of labour violations overa six-country,eight-year time series of roughly 3000 audits from the ILO’s Better Work program. With this data, it addresses questions abouthow institutions, public policy and civil society can influence the success of global labour governance programs.Although exploring a small set of countries, the data provides interesting insight intothe degree to which certaineconomic, political and social structures may obstruct or stimulate to the success of global labour governance within a given context. The paperthus aims to contribute to the discussion on“if” and “how” the interaction between private and public regulation may influence thedevelopment of labour standards.

Judith C. Stroehle is a PhD candidate in "Economic Sociology and Labour Studies" in her last year at the NASP graduate-school of the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy. She is visiting research fellow at IBEI since February. Her thesis and current research is on the effectiveness of private labour governance programs in the apparel and footwear industry and their complementarities and interdependencies with forms of public governance. In particular, she studies the institutional contextualities of compliance data (monitoring data) from cases such as the FLA (Fair Labor Association) and the ILO Better Work programme. Before starting the PhD, Judith went to Highschool in Australia and Germany, spent some time working in a social project in Paraguay and finally obtained a BA of Sociology at the University of Bamberg in Germany and a MA of International Political Economy and Labour Studies in Bamberg and at the Université Bishop in Québéc, Canada. Between the times at the University, Judith worked for two years at a private firm in Munich as International Relations Manager.

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