What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo-Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance's problem-solving potential and its interactions with public policy.

中文翻译：

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私人监管、公共政策和逆本体选择的危险

私人监管治理可以解决哪些问题，公共政策应该发挥什么作用？尽管可以获得相同的经验证据，但目前关于私人治理的学术研究对这些问题提供了截然不同的答案。通过批判性审查，本文详细介绍了五种在本体论上截然不同的学术逻辑——计算战略行为；学习和实验过程；政治制度主义；全球价值链和公约理论；和新葛兰西主义的解释——根据他们阐明的私人治理的特定方面提供不同的结论，而忽略了他们混淆的那些方面。在这个拥挤的思想市场，学者和实践者面临着不利的本体论选择的危险，从而系统地忽略某些方法和见解，并且某些问题概念优先于其他概念。作为纠正，我们鼓励学者明确他们的假设，并偶尔在逻辑之间切换，以更好地理解私人治理解决问题的潜力及其与公共政策的相互作用。