Abstract
Multi-stakeholder initiatives involve actors from several spheres of society (market, civil society and state) in collaborative arrangements to reach objectives typically related to sustainable development. In political CSR literature, these arrangements have been framed as improvements to transnational governance and as being somehow democratic. We draw on Mouffe’s works on agonistic pluralism to problematize the notion that consensus-led multi-stakeholder initiatives bring more democratic control on corporate power. We examine two initiatives which address two very different issue areas: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety (The Accord). We map the different kinds of adversarial relations involved in connection with the issues meant to be governed by the two initiatives, and find those adversarial relations to take six main shapes, affecting the initiatives in different ways: (1) competing regulatory initiatives; (2) pressure-response relations within multi-stakeholder initiatives; (3) pressure-response relations between NGOs and states through multi-stakeholder initiatives; (4) collaboration and competition between multi-stakeholder initiatives and states; (5) pressure-response relations between civil society actors and multi-stakeholder initiatives; and (6) counter-hegemonic movements against multi-stakeholder initiatives as hegemonic projects. We conclude that multi-stakeholder initiatives cannot be democratic by themselves, and we argue that business and society researchers should not look at democracy or politics only internally to these initiatives, but rather study how issue areas are regulated through interactions between a variety of actors—both within and without the multi-stakeholder initiatives—who get to have a legitimate voice in this regulation.
Highlights
The contemporary primacy of addressing sustainable development challenges has led to a seemingly universal acceptance of the ‘partnership paradigm’, whereby actors from several spheres of society form collaborative arrangements to reach sustainability objectives (Glasbergen 2007; Seitanidi 2010)
Presented as a challenge to understanding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) only in terms of a business case, seminal works on political CSR (Scherer and Palazzo 2007, 2011) have theorized corporations as ‘political actors’, and argued that corporations take on a political role when they engage in the transnational governance of issues that nation states are not able to regulate
Habermasian deliberative democracy has been used as a lens to frame this empirical phenomenon, and legitimize these arrangements as improvements to transnational governance
Summary
The contemporary primacy of addressing sustainable development challenges has led to a seemingly universal acceptance of the ‘partnership paradigm’, whereby actors from several spheres of society (market, civil society and state) form collaborative arrangements to reach sustainability objectives (Glasbergen 2007; Seitanidi 2010). This trend, discussed under various umbrella terms such as ‘transnational private. The empirical phenomenon most in focus in political CSR has been multi-stakeholder initiatives involving business actors, civil society organizations and sometimes staterelated actors. The argument is that these arrangements, which are presented as pragmatically involving in the governance of certain issues the important stakeholders, are in some way democratic because different interests are allegedly represented and consensus is meant to be reached through deliberation
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