National Action Plans (NAPs) on business and human rights are a growing phenomenon. Since 2011, 42 such plans have been adopted or are in-development worldwide. By comparison, only 39 general human rights action plans were published between 1993 and 2021. In parallel, NAPs have attracted growing scholarly interest. While some studies highlight their potential to advance national compliance with international norms, others criticise NAPs as cosmetic devices that states use to deflect attention from persisting abuses and needed regulation. In response to wider critiques of international human rights norms, and their failure to exact universal state compliance, experimentalist governance theory highlights the dynamic, dialogic and iterative character of human rights implementation as well as the role of stakeholders. In this article, we apply experimentalist governance theory to evaluate the role and character of business and human rights NAPs. Rather than attempting to evaluate NAPs’ ultimate consequences for rights-holders, which appears premature, we focus on NAPs processes. Specifically, we analyse NAPs processes in twenty-five states against five experimentalist governance criteria relating to (i) stakeholder participation; (ii) agreement on a broad problem definition; (iii) local contextualisation; (iv) monitoring and peer review and (v) periodic revision and learning. According to our findings, NAPs on business and human rights in most states demonstrate resemblance to the traits of experimentalist governance. In particular, our analysis points to the emergence of relatively sophisticated and demanding institutional governance mechanisms within NAPs — including the institutionalisation of complex deliberative processes. Nevertheless, our paper also identifies some significant shortcomings in NAPs, related to the lack of inclusion of vulnerable groups and the lack of explicit indicators and targets.

关于商业和人权的国家行动计划 (NAPs) 是一个日益增长的现象。自 2011 年以来，全球已有 42 个此类计划被采纳或正在制定中。相比之下，1993 年至 2021 年间仅发布了 39 项一般人权行动计划。与此同时，国家行动计划引起了越来越多的学术兴趣。虽然一些研究强调了它们促进国家遵守国际规范的潜力，但其他人批评 NAP 是国家用来转移人们对持续滥用和所需监管的注意力的美容装置。为了回应对国际人权规范的更广泛批评，以及它们未能让国家普遍遵守，实验主义治理理论强调了人权实施的动态、对话和迭代特征以及利益相关者的作用。在本文中，我们应用实验主义治理理论来评估商业和人权 NAP 的作用和特征。我们不是试图评估 NAP 对权利持有人的最终后果，这似乎为时过早，而是关注 NAP 流程。具体而言，我们根据与 (i) 利益相关者参与相关的五个实验性治理标准分析了 25 个州的 NAP 流程；(ii) 就广泛的问题定义达成一致；(iii) 本地化；(iv) 监督和同行评审以及 (v) 定期修订和学习。根据我们的调查结果，大多数州关于商业和人权的 NAP 表现出与实验主义治理特征的相似之处。特别是，我们的分析指出，在 NAP 中出现了相对复杂且要求严格的机构治理机制——包括复杂审议过程的制度化。尽管如此，我们的论文还指出了 NAP 的一些重大缺陷，这些缺陷与缺乏将弱势群体包括在内以及缺乏明确的指标和目标有关。