Room for Manoeuvre? Regulatory Compliance in the Global Shipping Industry

Abstract

This article combines data from two separate studies of the shipping industry, one on enforcement of new regulations on the use of low-sulphur fuel and one on supply chain influences on ship operators’ health and safety policies and practices. The shipping industry is a valuable natural laboratory for the study of patterns of compliance and governance in late modernity because it is characterised both by highly developed polycentric governance structures and by globalising economic processes including vertically disaggregated global value chains, outsourcing and offshoring. Segmented markets have permitted some ‘blue riband’ companies to operate a social license ‘beyond compliance’, and that such social licenses are more extensive in respect of environment policies than in health and safety policies that may be attributed to supply chain influences. Ship operators’ compliance is seen as a combination of instrumental compliance, normative compliance, a taken for granted culture of compliance and corporate policies of labour-force governance. A taken for granted culture of compliance is identified as the main reason for compliance with the new low-sulphur regulations, which are currently (uncharacteristically) subject to only limited enforcement effort.