ABSTRACT

The nation-state governments and public authorities have been moved – and have moved themselves – out of the driver seat when it comes to making global governance decisions. The leaders in this new form of global governance are an amalgamation of designated “stakeholders,” collectively known as “multistakeholders.” This terminology was not previously part of the lexicon of international relations but it has been powerfully elevated to a new status. The proliferation of multistakeholder governance arrangements, each with its own raison d’être, have created experimental platforms for testing different modes of multistakeholder governance. However, there has been no governance evaluation of multistakeholderism or even a clear functional definition of this form of global governance.

This chapter explores twelve political and economic developments that have created the international political space for these experiments. The first four of these political realities are derived from institutional failures – or the perception about institutional failures – to manage current macro-economic, social, and ecological global realities. The next four reflect the fundamental transition over the past fifty years in the relationship between the UN system, TNCs and CSOs, respectively. This includes changes in how certain TNCs and CSOs perceive members of the other camp and how TNCs and globally powerful elites have come to recognize the need for some new quasi-state function at the international level. The last four tracks exemplify how different international forces have come to accept that multistakeholder governance has the potential to be the next phase of global governance.