ABSTRACT
Nonstate actors have become increasingly prominent in international affairs over the past twenty years as organizations, issues, and channels of communication have multiplied and diversified. This chapter offers a private-sector perspective on the increasingly important role of nonstate actors in multilateral diplomacy and global governance. It discusses the reasons for the rise of multisectoral multilateralism. The first has to be the extraordinary explosion in national, sectoral, and organizational diversity that has taken place over the last forty years. Multisector multilateralism is a relatively new phenomenon that did not really start to take off until the 1990s. The most promising area for multisector multilateralism is probably encompassed in the fields of humanitarian assistance and global development. Business Civic Leadership Center (BCLC) and the US Chamber worked with broad coalitions of both public- and private-sector actors in the response to the 2004 tsunami. In short, the modern iteration of multisectoral multilateralism is a relatively new phenomenon and definitely a work in progress.
