This chapter offers an analysis of the challenges for governments and the private sector in cybersecurity governance from a systemic perspective. It first identifies the challenges that the liberal international order, characterised by political liberalism, economic openness, and international cooperation, has faced in the area of cybersecurity governance. It also observes that there have so far been no successful global efforts to harmonise rules or create a unified regime. This chapter then emphasises how the private sector’s essential role as innovators possessing technological expertise is unique to cybergovernance and explains how the interplay of different actors, both public and private, has practical meaning for states and actors.

Institutions of transnational industrial democracy are emerging, as demonstrated in the book. However, the relationship between these transnational structures and national systems has often been overlooked. Chapter 7 thus focuses on the relationship between transnational industrial democracy and national institutions in Bangladesh: the relationship between the Bangladesh Accord, on the one hand, and national actors from the industry association and government of Bangladesh, on the other. For national actors, the imposition of private labour governance through the Accord undermined local democratic institutions, and thus became highly contentious. This highlights the trade-off between effectiveness and inclusiveness of private governance. While collective action from over 200 signatory companies has been vital in driving factory owners to remediate urgent safety issues, it also created quasi-authority to regulate and close sites of production by withdrawing orders from unsafe or non-cooperative factories. Overall, Chapter 7 raises challenging questions about democratic governance and the intersection of transnational and national spheres.

Elinor Ostrom pointed out significance of rule structures, and the need for institutional diversity in addressing commons problems.This is particularly true in relation to the governance of large-scale commons resources and one global commons that requires attention is the economic system.We share the institutional arrangements that generate economic benefits but neither the wealth generated by the system, nor the negative impacts, are shared equally.The result is an economic system focused on the privatisation of shared resources that generates inequalities around the globe. This paper explores the economic system as a ‘co-created’ commons.The paper brings together two broad strands of literature on commons: one arising from the public trust doctrine, and the other based on the economic characteristics of a good or service in terms of its access (‘excludability’) and consumption (‘subtractability’).The paper links these concepts with more recent work on ‘productive commons’, where shared resources are generated through collaborative activity, and ideas from evolutionary economics, which explore the economic system as a process and structure of rules, rather than as a series of transactions based on the allocation of property rights.Evidence is provided to support the argument that commons are an integral element of the economic system, and as a result account for some of its efficiencies and, where rule structures fail, for negative impacts on socio-economic and ecological systems.