This chapter provides an overview of key developments in the business and human rights landscape, more recent global efforts, and challenges that remain. The first half of this introductory chapter discusses the landmark policy efforts over the past forty years. Given the widespread development of voluntary or “soft law” initiatives, the second half of this chapter explores the fundamental challenge in business and human rights: the question of accountability. Even in cases of wrongdoing, jurisdictional issues, the corporate veil, and lack of political will present important challenges to holding firms accountable. This chapter tells the old narrative of corporate impunity and governance gaps; it introduces a new story that draws from systematic data and illustrative examples to explore the pathways by which victims gain access to remedy mechanisms.

The UN and its Charter, despite the many laudable aims, legal principles and values it enshrines, is today too heavily constrained by the commitments it makes to uphold outdated notions of state sovereignty; it is saddled by the veto; it is inadequately resourced; it has not succeeded in establishing a genuine international system of rule by law; and it has consistently proved incapable of controlling or preventing abuses of power and other forms of internationally dangerous state behavior. Nevertheless, we argue that the more sensible approach in developing the foundations of an enhanced global constitutional order is to build on the existing institutional infrastructure associated with the United Nations: it has universal membership; it has accumulated over the past 70 years a body of texts and practices that have precipitated important changes in selected areas; it has participated, however ineffectively, in most of the peace and security debates of the postwar period; and the Security Council has the power to enforce binding international law. More importantly, the UN Charter can be amended, modernized and adapted to the needs of the present. We discuss the possible ways ahead, suggesting the most workable mechanisms for next steps in our evolving governance system.

Facing a complex set of global threats to our future, how do we find a way forward? It is clearly necessary to strengthen the capacity to enforce international law, to reform legal institutions and current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have turned out to be largely inadequate to manage the challenges that we face. Indeed, the United Nations itself and the specialized agencies created to attend to a variety of global problems find themselves increasingly unable to respond to crises, partly due to the lack of appropriate jurisdiction or mandate to act, sometimes because they are inadequately endowed with resources or because, within the limits of existing conceptual frameworks, they simply do not know what to do. A substantial and carefully thought-through reform effort is needed to enhance dramatically the basic architecture of our global governance system, grounded on fundamental points of law already agreed by states worldwide, and upon foundational principles embedded in the current international order. Such efforts need to strike the right balance between proposals that are so ambitious as to have negligible chances of being seriously considered and proposals that are seen as more “politically feasible” but that fail to find meaningful solutions to urgent contemporary problems.