Abstract
Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have been praised as vehicles for tackling complex sustainability issues, but their success relies on the reconciliation of stakeholders’ divergent perspectives. We yet lack a thorough understanding of the micro-level mechanisms by which stakeholders can deal with these differences. To develop such understanding, we examine what frames—i.e., mental schemata for making sense of the world—members of MSIs use during their discussions on sustainability questions and how these frames are deliberated through social interactions. Whilst prior framing research has focussed on between-frame conflicts, we offer a different perspective by examining how and under what conditions actors use shared frames to tackle ‘within-frame conflicts’ on views that stand in the way of joint decisions. Observations of a deliberative environmental valuation workshop and interviews in an MSI on the protection of peatlands—ecosystems that contribute to carbon retention on a global scale—demonstrated how the application and deliberation of shared frames during micro-level interactions resulted in increased salience, elaboration, and adjustment of shared frames. We interpret our findings to identify characteristics of deliberation mechanisms in the case of within-frame conflicts where shared frames dominate the discussions, and to delineate conditions for such dominance. Our findings contribute to an understanding of collaborations in MSIs and other organisational settings by demonstrating the utility of shared frames for dealing with conflicting views and suggesting how shared frames can be activated, fostered and strengthened.
Highlights
Today’s pressing challenges to the sustainability of social, economic and ecological systems are complex, closely intertwined with each other, and relevant to a broad spectrum of stakeholders (Liu et al, 2018)
Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) range from large, well-known global partnerships such as the UN’s cross-sector collaborations for reducing poverty (Utting & Zammit, 2009) and certification initiatives that create non-governmental governance mechanisms to small projects where local stakeholders participate in decision making concerning particular
Extrapolating from our findings, we suggest that these deliberation mechanisms are characteristic to settings of within-frame conflicts where actors can draw on shared frames
Summary
Today’s pressing challenges to the sustainability of social, economic and ecological systems are complex, closely intertwined with each other, and relevant to a broad spectrum of stakeholders (Liu et al, 2018). Socio-ecological systems (Kenter, 2016a, 2016b; Raymond & Kenter, 2016; Reed et al, 2017a) These smaller participative projects generally do not take the form of legal partnerships, and tend to involve stakeholders that are not representatives of organisations and do not have formal decision-making power, such as local community members. Multi-stakeholder collaborations often struggle to achieve the joint decisions they aim for because it proves hard to bridge multiple stakeholders’ different or even conflicting interests and perspectives (e.g. Dentoni et al, 2018; Ferraro et al, 2015; Gray & Purdy, 2018; Kenter et al, 2014, 2016a, 2016b; Moog et al, 2015; Ranger et al, 2016; Reed et al, 2013, 2017a; Reinecke & Ansari, 2015). Interaction frames in turn concern the communication process and appropriate ways of behaving during the interaction (DeWulf et al, 2009)
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