ABSTRACT
For over four hundred years the centrality of the nation-state was the guiding principle of international relations. All other institutional forces formally recognized that governments were the exclusive official actor in global governance. In marked change from the multilateral world, in the multistakeholder world the basic governing unit is a “stakeholder,” which may or may not include nation-states and international organizations. Phrased in a different way, multistakeholderism is seeking to displace the nation-state and by implication the UN system as the central actors in international relations.
In a national context, the status of TNCs and CSOs is derivative and dependent on the nation-state which registers them and grants them their legal status. In multistakeholderism, these actors and other non-state actors are asserting that in certain circumstances they should have a similar status – or an even greater status – as nation-states in global governance. In other cases, non-state actors assert that they have not taken on governmental authority but act as if they were state authorities.
The advent of multistakeholderism as a potential next form of global governance invites the study of a number of unresolved – and maybe unresolvable – democratic challenges. As reviewed in this chapter, these democratic challenges include: (a) the foundational concept of “stakeholders;” (b) boundaries around each stakeholder category; (c) the role of the convener; (d) the selection of global governance participants; (e) the global governance roles of TNCs and CSOs; (f) the asymmetries of power between stakeholder categories; and (g) the potential shift in national obligations, responsibilities, and liabilities.
