Abstract
Multi-stakeholder participation (MSP) has become a central feature in several institutions and processes of global governance. Those who promote them trust that these arrangements can advance the deliberative quality of international institutions, and thereby improve the democratic quality, legitimacy and effectiveness of both the institutional landscape, as well as decisions made within it. This paper employs a heuristic framework to analyze the deliberative quality of MSP. Specifically, it applies Dryzek’s deliberative systems framework to the case of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The assessment shows that the CFS improves the deliberative quality of food security governance by including and facilitating the transmission of discourses from the public to the empowered spaces. However, the deliberative quality of CFS could be higher with stronger accountability mechanisms in place, more meta-deliberation and adoption of CFS outcomes at national and local levels. Reflecting on the limitations of using this heuristic framework to assess MSP, we conclude that the analysis would benefit from more explicit consideration of different forms of power that are part of the social relations between actors involved in such settings. By proposing this analytical approach, we expect to advance a heuristic framework for assessing deliberation in an international context of the growing importance of MSP in sustainability and global governance.
Highlights
The proliferation of multi-stakeholder participation (MSP) is one of the most significant and studied changes in global governance of the past three decades
One promising possibility would be to explicitly investigate how power asymmetries influence transmission, accountability and decisiveness. By proposing this analytical exercise, we expect to advance a heuristic framework for assessing deliberation in MSP that could be useful in the context of the growing importance of this instrument in sustainable development and global governance
With almost a decade since this reform, this statement may sound over-enthusiastic, since the Committee suffers from well-known limitations in becoming the authoritative forum for global decision-making in an institutional landscape of global food governance that is characterized by institutional fragmentation [47] and dominated by immense power asymmetries among actors [18]
Summary
The proliferation of multi-stakeholder participation (MSP) is one of the most significant and studied changes in global governance of the past three decades. The reasoning behind this question is to neither fully embrace, nor disregard MSP, but rather explore more deeply the specifics of these arrangements, with the aim of contributing to a heuristic framework of how MSP contributes to the deliberative quality of the international system To address this question, we apply Dryzek’s deliberative system framework [15,16,17] to one United Nations’ Committee where multi-stakeholder participation features prominently: The Committee on World Food Security (CFS). One promising possibility would be to explicitly investigate how power asymmetries influence transmission, accountability and decisiveness By proposing this analytical exercise, we expect to advance a heuristic framework for assessing deliberation in MSP that could be useful in the context of the growing importance of this instrument in sustainable development and global governance. The paper concludes with a synthesis of heuristic and empirical observations (Section 4)
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