ABSTRACT
Prevailing approaches to SDG 16 envisage a private-sector role in helping build ‘more inclusive and peaceful societies’. Businesspeople and enterprises may be important, motivated peacebuilding stakeholders with useful resources and ideas. They are not necessarily less legitimate or more politicised than civil society groups, with whom donors routinely interact. This is one basis for the argument that external authorities with a peacebuilding mandate should pursue strategies – generally and in specific settings – to engage responsible business actors in the SDG 16 agenda. Considerable high-level policy rhetoric supports this. Yet policymakers are less clear on what should govern ‘engagement’ with business in fragile and conflict-affected situations. The appropriateness of such relationships have not typically been theorised, couched in notions of power, legitimacy or agency, or given a principled underpinning. Debate has oscillated between the paralysis of scholars sceptical of engaging business in peacebuilding, and the proselytising of those who advocate a greater role for business in goals such as SDG 16. This chapter explores a research agenda, in going beyond the broad institutional rhetoric of the SDGs, for developing contextualised and principled policy approaches that are open to closely engaging responsible business actors but alert to the risks that collaboration becomes inappropriate or illegitimate.
