Multi-stakeholder partnerships have emerged as a critical mechanism for addressing global challenges that individual actors cannot tackle alone, yet most such initiatives fail to achieve meaningful implementation or simply dissolve over time. The tension lies in a fundamental paradox: broad, ambiguous goals are often necessary to bring conflicting parties together, but this same ambiguity can prevent effective action when agreements must be translated into concrete commitments.

Professor Juliane Reinecke of the University of Oxford and Professor Jimmy Donaghey of the University of South Australia conducted an eight-year study to understand how some multi-stakeholder partnerships overcome this challenge to build durable institutions for collective action. Their research focuses on the Bangladesh Accord for Fire and Building Safety, examining how “constructive ambiguity” – deliberately imprecise language used to secure agreement among conflicting parties – can evolve from a potential source of weakness into a catalyst for institutional strength and expansion.

When the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed in Bangladesh on April 23, 2013, killing more than 1,100 workers and injuring over 2,500 others, it represented the deadliest industrial accident in the history of the global garment industry. The tragedy exposed the failure of individual corporate social responsibility efforts to ensure even basic worker safety in global supply chains. Within just three weeks of the disaster, an unprecedented agreement emerged: the Bangladesh Accord for Fire and Building Safety, bringing together more than 200 multinational clothing brands, trade unions, and labor rights organizations in a legally binding commitment to transform factory safety in Bangladesh.

As the authors explain, what made this agreement remarkable was not just its rapid formation under intense public pressure, but its subsequent evolution into one of the most effective private governance initiatives in global supply chains. The researchers’ findings uncover the fascinating paradox at the heart of this success story: the very ambiguity that made the initial agreement possible later became the catalyst for far more stringent commitments than anyone had originally envisaged.

The concept of “constructive ambiguity” describes the deliberate use of imprecise language in sensitive negotiations to secure agreement among parties with conflicting interests. This approach has been employed in high-stakes political negotiations, such as the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, where precise wording might have prevented any agreement at all. In the Bangladesh Accord, constructive ambiguity was essential because brands, unions, and non-governmental organizations had fundamentally different perspectives on corporate responsibility, worker rights, and the role of regulation in global supply chains.

Reinecke and Donaghey explain that the initial Accord text was deliberately vague about crucial implementation details. For example, while brands committed to “require” that their supplier factories participated in safety inspections and remediation, the agreement left unclear what “require” meant in practice.

Seven months after signing, it remained unclear whether the agreement would amount to anything more than symbolic corporate public relations. Factory inspections had not begun and the Accord had no office, no bank account, and was not even registered in Bangladesh.

However, rather than leading to institutional breakdown, the process of confronting ambiguities triggered a complex political dynamic that actually strengthened the institution. Reinecke and Donaghey identified a multi-stage process they term “escalating commitment,” where parties gradually took on far more extensive obligations than initially planned. The process began with what the researchers call “meaning negotiation.” When safety inspections revealed that 100 percent of covered factories had serious safety concerns, with seventeen requiring immediate closure, the ambiguous responsibilities in the original agreement had to be clarified.

Brand representatives, union leaders, and NGO activists engaged in intensive negotiations. These negotiations were often contentious. Labor representatives pushed for stringent interpretations of brand responsibilities, arguing that companies should provide direct financial support for factory improvements. Brands, meanwhile, were reluctant to provide what one described as “a blank cheque book” to poorly managed factories. However, the shared recognition that institutional failure would harm all parties motivated compromise.

Reinecke and Donaghey identified three layers of what they term “commitment enforcement” that emerged from this process. First, unions and NGOs leveraged the legal and reputational risks that brands had accepted by signing the agreement. Second, this pressure activated “peer policing” among the brands themselves. Leading brands began pressuring laggards to meet their obligations, creating a reinforcing dynamic of mutual accountability. Third, these combined pressures enabled the Accord to exercise collective leverage over supplier factories. Individual brands had limited power to compel factory owners to invest in expensive safety improvements, but the threat of losing orders from more than 200 companies provided powerful incentives for compliance.

This layered enforcement process led to remarkable results. Factory safety improved dramatically, with remediation rates reaching over 93 percent by 2021. The presence of the Accord contributed to a radical reduction in fatal accidents in Bangladesh’s garment industry, while total export volumes more than doubled after the Rana Plaza disaster.

Perhaps most significantly, the political process of resolving ambiguities created what the researchers term “institutional tie-in” – an increasing stake in the institution’s success that motivated continued and expanding commitment. As parties invested more resources, time, and reputation in the Accord, they became more committed to its survival and success. Brands that initially signed “with a gun to our heads” under public pressure gradually embraced the agreement as an effective business solution.

This dynamic explains the Accord’s remarkable longevity and expansion. Despite the original five-year term ending in 2018, brands and unions negotiated extensions and expansions that increased both the scope and scale of their commitments. The 2018 Transition Accord added freedom of association protections for workers. The 2021 International Accord committed to expanding the model to at least four additional countries with the parallel Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety.

Overall, Reinecke and Donaghey’s research challenges conventional wisdom about both international negotiations and corporate social responsibility. Rather than viewing ambiguity as a flaw in agreement design, their findings suggest it can be a crucial feature that enables initial consensus while creating space for more substantive commitments to evolve through political engagement.

Professor Reinecke and Professor Donaghey’s research has important implications for addressing other global challenges that require collective action. Their work suggests that effective governance institutions may need to begin with deliberately ambiguous commitments that can evolve through political processes. However, such institutions are not built through technical design alone. They must be constructed through ongoing political processes that enable parties to discover and commit to shared solutions for collective challenges.