Multistakeholder governance is a practice of governance that employs bringing multiple stakeholders together to participate in dialogue, decision making, and implementation of responses to jointly perceived problems. The principle behind such a structure is that if enough input is provided by multiple types of actors involved in a question, the eventual consensual decision gains more legitimacy, and can be more effectively implemented than a traditional state-based response. While the evolution of multistakeholder governance is occurring principally at the international level, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are domestic analogues.
Stakeholders refer to a collection of actors from different social, political, economic spheres working intentionally together to govern a physical, social, economic, or policy area. The range of actors can include multinational corporations, national enterprises, governments, civil society bodies, academic experts, community leaders, religious figures, media personalities and other institutional groups.
At a minimum a multistakeholder group must have two or more actors from different social, political, or economic groups. If not, then the group is a trade association (all business groups), a multilateral body (all governments), a professional body (all scholars), etc. Almost all multistakeholder bodies have at least one multinational corporation or business-affiliated body and at least one civil society organization or alliance of civil society organizations as key members.
Alternative terminologies for multistakeholder governance include multi-stakeholder initiatives(MSIs),Utting, P. (2001). "Regulating Business Via Multistakeholder Initiatives: A Preliminary Assessment." (Paper prepared in late 2001 under the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) research project "Promoting Corporate Environmental and Social Responsibility in Developing Countries: The Potential and Limits of Voluntary Initiatives".) Accessed 14/May/2014, Fuchs, D., Kalfagianni, A., & Havinga, T. (2011) "Actors in private food governance: the legitimacy of retail standards and multistakeholder initiatives with civil society participation", Agriculture and Human Values, September 2011, Volume 28, Issue 3, pp 353-367. Multi-StakeHolder (MSH), multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs),Hemmati, Minu (Ed.) 2002. Multi-stakeholder Processes for Governance and Sustainability: Beyond Deadlock and Conflict. London: Earthscan. public-private partnerships (PPPs), transnational multistakeholder Partnerships (transnational MSPs), informal governance arrangements, and non-state regulation.
The key term 'multistakeholder' (or 'multistakeholderism') is increasingly spelled without a hyphen to maintain consistency with its predecessor 'multilateralism' and to associate this new form of governance with one of the key actors involved that is also generally spelled without a hyphen; 'multinationals'. 'Multistakeholderism' is similarly used in parallel to bilateralism and regionalism.
As an evolving global governance form, only a limited number of organizations and institutions are involved in multistakeholderism. In a number of arenas, opposing forces are actively challenging the legitimacy, accountability, and effectiveness of these experimental changes in global governance.
Contemporary history and theory Stakeholder management theory, stakeholder project management theory, and stakeholder government agency theory have all contributed to the intellectual foundation for multistakeholder governance. The history and theory of multistakeholder governance however departs from these models in four ways. The earlier theories describe how a central institution (be it a business, a project, or a government agency) should engage more formally with related institutions (be it other organizations, institutions, or communities). In multistakeholder governance, the central element of multistakeholder undertaking is a public concern (e.g. protection of the climate, management of the internet, or the use of natural resources), not a pre-existing organization. Second, the earlier theories aimed to strengthen a pre-existing institution. In multistakeholder governance, multistakeholder groups can strengthen associated institutions but they can also marginalize institutions or functions of existing governance bodies (e.g. governmental regulatory authorities, UN system). As earlier theories were concerned with improving the operations of corporations and project management, they did not need to address the public governance consequences of multistakeholder decision-making. They also provide little or no guidance to autonomous multistakeholder groups on their internal rules of governance, as the pre-existing institution had its own functioning decision-making system.
As multistakeholderism is an evolving system of governance, a good deal of its theoretical underpinning is a combination of formal theoretical writing and theory-derived from practice. World Economic Forum's Global Redesign Initiative
The most extensive theoretical writing and most detailed practical proposals comes from the World Economic Forum's Global Redesign Initiative (GRI). Its 2010 600-page report "Everybody's Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World"WEF (2010). "Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World" Retrieved from report was a comprehensive proposal for re-designing global governance. The report sought to change in fundamental ways the global governance system built since World War II. The report authored by the leadership of the World Economic Forum, including Klaus Schwab, is a series of broad policy papers on multistakeholder governance and a broad array of theme-specific policy options. These policy and thematic program recommendations were designed to display the new governance structure's ability to respond to a range of global crises. These global policy areas include investment flows; educational systems; systemic financial risk; philanthropy and social investing; emerging multinationals; fragile states; social entrepreneurship; energy security; international security cooperation; mining and metals; the future of government; ocean governance; and ethical values. What sets the World Economic Forum's proposal apart is that it was developed as a cooperative effort involving 750 experts from the international business, governmental, and academic communities working in sixty separate task forces for one and a half years (2009/2010).
WEF also had over fifty years' experience convening leading stakeholders from the political, economic, cultural, civil society, religious, and other communities to discuss the way forward in global affairs. As the three co-chairs observed in their introduction to the GRI report: "The time has come for a new stakeholder paradigm of international governance analogous to that embodied in the stakeholder theory of corporate governance on which the World Economic Forum itself was founded."
Intergovernmental bodies in the UN system
The United Nations effort to develop multistakeholder governance is widely regarded to have started with the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (more commonly known at the Rio Conference). There, governments created nine major non-state groups which could be part of the official intergovernmental process. Ten years later in Johannesburg the follow-up conference created a new multistakeholder implementation process called officially "type II conference outcomes," where transnational corporations, NGOs, and governments pledged to work together to implement a specific section of the conference report.Type II Partnerships
A separate government effort to define multistakeholder governance has been a series of United Nations General Assembly resolutions on 'partnerships'. The earliest resolution (2002) drew "the attention of Member States to multi-stakeholder initiatives, in particular, the Global Compact Initiative of the Secretary-General, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, the multi-stakeholder dialogue process of the Commission on Sustainable Development and the Information and Communication Technologies Task Force".United Nations. (2002). Resolution adopted by the General Assembly: Towards global partnerships. General Assembly, 56th Session. Retrieved from refworld.org Over the next 17 years until 2019, the governments at the United Nations continued to evolve their understanding of multistakeholder governance by adopting eight other related resolutions.
In the most recent partnership resolution from 2019, governments identified a number of principles that should define a multistakeholder partnership. Governments "stresse[d] ...[A partnership should have a] common purpose, transparency, bestowing no unfair advantages upon any partner of the United Nations, mutual benefit and mutual respect, accountability, respect for the modalities of the United Nations, striving for balanced representation of relevant partners from developed and developing countries and countries with economies in transition, and not compromising the independence and neutrality of the United Nations system in general and the agencies in particular".United Nations. (2018). Towards global partnerships: a principle-based approach to enhanced cooperation between the United Nations and all relevant partners. General Assembly, 73rd Session. Retrieved from www.unglobalcompact.org
In the same resolution, government further defined the 'common purpose' and 'mutual benefit and respect' as voluntary partnerships and as "collaborative relationships between various parties, both public and non-public, in which all participants agree to work together to achieve a common purpose or undertake a specific task and, as mutually agreed, to share risks and responsibilities, resources and benefits".
Civil society organizations within the UN system
Civil society organizations have had a series of parallel but distinct exchanges on the theory and practice of multistakeholder governance. Two elements of the definition of multistakeholder governance that are not central to the intergovernmental debate are (1) the connection between democracy and multistakeholder governance and (2) the assessment of the efficiency and effectiveness of multistakeholder projects.
In 2019 Felix Dodds, a founder of the Stakeholder Forum, argued that "involving stakeholders in the decision-making process makes them more likely to partner with each other and with governments at all levels to help deliver on the commitments associated with [intergovernmentally adopted] agreements".Dodds, F. 2019 Stakeholder Democracy: Represented Democracy in a Time of Fear, London, Routledge In this perspective, the evolution of multistakeholder governance marks a positive transformation from representative democracy to stakeholder-based participatory democracy.