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Department of International Politics ISO AND SOCIAL STANDARDISATION: UNCOMFORTABLE COMPROMISES IN GLOBAL POLICY-MAKING Alejandro M. Pe?a Working Paper CUTP/009A ? Alejandro M. Pe?a, October 2011 This is a work in progress. Feedback welcome. Contact: alejandro.pena.1@city.ac.uk Series Editor: Tom Davies (tom.davies@city.ac.uk) WORKING PAPERS ON TRANSNATIONAL POLITICS 2 Abstract This paper intends to explore the involvement of ISO, the world’s most iconic standard-setting institution, in the field of social responsibility, leading to the publication of the ISO26000 standard in November, 2010. Through several aspects of this experience, an almost decade-long process, I will show how ISO developed a new political structure aimed specifically at creating global policy, originating one the most sophisticated frameworks in existence to consensualise ‘universal’ socio- political principles and infuse them with the legitimacy of a ‘global’ technocracy and liberal institutions. Moreover, I will use the latest ISO26000 experience to argue that conceptual and institutional minimalism, which favours ‘soft’ approaches towards global policy-making, paradoxically results from combining a technocratic aim for global compatibility with more participatory decision-making arrangements involving previously excluded socio-political actors. In that sense, ISO’s upgraded participatory mechanisms solved certain deadlocks suffered by previous initiatives only to affront and spark a new round of contradictions and consequences. Thus, I will conclude commenting on the intrinsic relationship between global standards, governance and complexity, and the difficulties of politically articulating programmes with dissimilar functional differentiation. Introduction Processes of international standardisation have accompanied the spread of trade and industry since the mid-19th century. Among such efforts, the establishment of cro