Institutional analysis of the post-Rana Plaza transnational interventions: Technical, policy and political change in the RMG sector of Bangladesh

The thesis focuses on how the disaster politics played out in the aftermath of Rana Plaza collapse, a major industrial disaster in modern labour history occurred in the urban built-up area of Bangladesh. The thesis contributes to the literature on disaster politics and some new institutional theories. Disaster politics puts emphasis on the social and political construction of disaster events. However, the field of disaster politics is primarily focused on natural disaster events. As industrial disasters are increasingly recognised as disasters in the same way to natural events, studying cases like Rana Plaza can provide significant insights into the field. Disaster politics literature predominantly hinges on how disasters are recognised, responded to and what role politics play in that determination. This thesis is based upon this stream of literature, particularly focusing on the politics of response to Rana Plaza disaster. The politics of response has been analysed focusing on the transnational interventions launched after the Rana Plaza especially focusing on the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Safety (Accord).

Disaster politics literature, while recognises the change triggered by the disaster events, provides an incomplete account on how the post-disaster change processes are shaped, politicised and implemented in the context of a weak governance like Bangladesh. To address this problem, the thesis adopted an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the post-disaster politicisation of worker rights at three different levels – technical, policy and political – to understand the politics of change at each level. In doing so, the thesis integrates institutional theories, particularly political settlement framework and informal institutions, to analyse the post-disaster institutional change. The thesis analyses disaster politics and institutional change by mapping various public and private actors engaged in the post-disaster interventions using an interview-based case study method and reviewing secondary information.

Evidence from this research suggests that post-Rana Plaza interventions successfully made private codes and national labour laws more enforceable, particularly around safety compliance. The shared focus on safety compliance, i.e., inspection, remediation, transparency and training, produced significant technical change, whereas policy change remained less significant. Although local elites forming the current political settlement were flexible initially showing signs of policy changes, they remained resilient to block a 'new political settlement' in labour governance. Moreover, the public-private co-governance initiatives largely ignored areas considered highly political and sensitive to the domestic elites, including political leaders and RMG business owners. Therefore, political and institutional changes expected to occur in a post-disaster context were not established in the Rana Plaza case.

Based on the analysis, this thesis illustrates how the current political settlement in Bangladesh undermines the politicisation process of worker rights in the RMG sector by weakening transnational actors, particularly global unions and by extension local ones, which fell prey to its own trap of adopting a ‘technocratic approach’ focusing primarily on inspection and remediation, instead of substantially engaging in the political movements as conventional trade unions do. The local macro-political order intercepts the progress towards substantive policy and political change in the social rights of the RMG workers. Therefore, the thesis argues that post-disaster institutional changes to labour governance are not entirely subject to the scale of disasters capable of mobilising transnational actors and resources but also to the disaster-stricken country's political settlement that largely determines the politics of the post-disaster governance reforms.