AnalysisOn the deliberative capacity of private multi-stakeholder governance: The Roundtables on Responsible Soy and Sustainable Palm Oil
Highlights
► The academic debate on democracy and global private governance is not conclusive. ► We adopted the concept of deliberative capacity to progress in this debate. ► We applied this concept to a specific type of private arrangement: Roundtables. ► Roundtables tend to fall short on two criteria of deliberative democracy. ► Those two criteria are inclusiveness and consequentiality.
Introduction
The past decades have witnessed the rise of private governance initiatives addressing sustainability problems that link a variety of stakeholders around the world. This ‘global megatrend’, which started around the 1990s, has accelerated over the past 10 years and is very likely to continue in the future (Falkner, 2011, p. 4). A specific form of global private governance is the ‘Roundtable’. Roundtables are private arrangements with the aim of improving the sustainability of a global commodity chain. They are multi-stakeholder platforms where private parties – businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – have decision-making power (Schouten and Glasbergen, 2011). Instead of creating a niche market, as is often the case with private global governance initiatives, Roundtables develop standards that are meant to make an entire commodity chain more sustainable.
Private multi-stakeholder arrangements have been discussed from different vantage points, among them their democratic credentials (Glasbergen, 2011). This debate is part of a larger academic and political debate on legitimacy and global governance, which has also been part of ecological economics (see for example the special section in Ecological Economics (2011) on accountability and legitimacy in earth system governance) (Biermann and Gupta, 2011). One interpretation regards these arrangements as part of the ‘deliberative turn’ in the governance of environmental and sustainability issues. This concept refers to the arrangements as “more or less explicit attempts to democratize politics and simultaneously foster more effective policies” (Bäckstrand et al., 2010, p. 4). These multi-stakeholder arrangements are considered by some authors as a way to address the democratic deficits of international governance institutions and interpreted as forums intended to promote learning, dialog, and best practices (Bexell and Mörth, 2010, p. 13).
On the other hand, the democratic potential of multi-stakeholder arrangements has been criticized because some groups have privileged access, collaborations may be focused on selective topics and discourses (Haufler, 2002), asymmetries of power might result in colonization of the arrangements by market actors (Newell, 2005, Richter, 2002, Saurin, 2001) and they might diffuse the radical potential of green critique (Falkner, 2003) (for a more detailed overview of these arguments see: Bexell and Mörth, 2010, Lövbrand and Khan, 2010). These two different and sometimes even opposing positions in the debate reveal difficulties in analyzing and assessing democracy in multi-stakeholder governance arrangements. This paper aims to contribute to nuancing the debate on democratic challenges that are presented by private governance arrangements.
Classical approaches to democracy as applied to nation-states do not fit these new private governance arrangements. Global private governance arrangements are self-mandated and, unlike democratic governments, are not formally authorized by their constituencies to govern a certain issue field (Dingwerth, 2007). Dingwerth (2007) recognizes three different approaches to democracy of governance beyond the state: constitutional, pluralist and deliberative approaches. The idea of a constitutional democracy is that “all political authority is understood to derive from the sovereign people who, conceived as equals, exercise their constituent power to create and define the nature and limits of ordinary political authority” (Freeman, 1990). The idea of pluralism requires “the dispersion of power among a variety of collective actors and the balancing of diverse social interests” (Dingwerth, 2007). While recognizing the pluralist nature of transnational governance, deliberative democracy approaches put emphasis on communication and reflection in decision-making (Dryzek, 2010). “Deliberation is based on arguing and persuasion as non-hierarchical means of steering to achieve a reasoned consensus rather than a bargaining compromise” (Risse, 2004). The main assumption is that “through open and reasoned argument, free from manipulation and the exercise of power, better and more legitimate decisions will arise” (Bäckstrand et al., 2010).
While all three approaches provide insights into democratic governance beyond the state, most authors seem to agree that deliberative democracy is most suitable to transnational governance (e.g. Dingwerth, 2007, Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011, Kronsell and Bäckstrand, 2010, Lövbrand and Khan, 2010). In the first two approaches, democratic legitimacy still relies for a large part on the state. Because private governance arrangements explicitly derive their authority from private actors and exclude state actors from their decision-making processes, constitutional and pluralist approaches to democracy do not fit the empirical reality of these kinds of arrangements. In contrast, deliberative approaches to democracy are not so dependent on the state, but rather on the discursive quality of collective decision-making (Dingwerth, 2007). Meadowcroft (2007) argues therefore that the potential of private governance arrangements to advance democracy does not lie in representative or aggregative approaches to democracy, but rather in increasing deliberative democratic interactions. These kinds of arrangements are said to provide arenas for deliberation, since the relations between actors in these networks would rely on communication, exchange of information, and on trustful and cooperative attitudes (Kronsell and Bäckstrand, 2010). In addition, new modes of environmental governance rest upon the underlying assumption that broad participation in collective decision-making will result in more effective policy outcomes (Bäckstrand et al., 2010). This also holds true for Roundtables, since they are presented as arrangements based on a deliberative democratic rationality. In general, Roundtables make two claims which emphasize their deliberative rationale: that through their communicative processes which include a wide variety of stakeholders they are able to create a common good, and, that these processes are open, inclusive and consensus-based.
To analyze and assess deliberative democracy, the concept of deliberative capacity arises. This concept builds on the rationale of deliberative democracy and refers to questions related to the openness of the communicative processes, the content of the discourses, and the consequences in terms of the conceptualization of the common good. This paper claims that this concept can help us to progress in the debate on the democratic potentials of transnational governance and of Roundtables in particular. Deliberative capacity is generally discussed in relation to states and other forms of ‘public governance’. However, this paper builds upon some early attempts to apply the concept to a broader range of governance arrangements by Dryzek (Dryzek, 2009, Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011) and Dingwerth (2007).
In the next section our analytical framework is presented along with a detailed operationalization of the concept of deliberative capacity and our research strategy. To analyze democracy as the deliberative capacity of Roundtables, this paper uses the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) as an in-depth case study. To verify whether the results of this first case study have a wider application, a quick scan of the deliberative capacity of a second Roundtable, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), is made. This article concludes on the use of the concept of deliberative capacity as an analytical tool to assess to what extent global private governance arrangements can be seen as democratic.
Section snippets
Elements of Deliberative Capacity
Dryzek (2009) defines deliberative capacity as the extent to which political systems possess structures to host deliberation that is inclusive, authentic, and consequential. This categorization is in line with others, for example the input, process and output/outcome categorization of participative processes by Burgess and Clark (2009). Without inclusiveness there can be deliberation, but it will not be democratic. Authenticity requires that deliberation non-coercively induces reflection,
Inclusion of Interests
Although the organization of the RTRS is based on norms of inclusiveness and participation and on paper is open to all stakeholders, this does not guarantee a representative sample of stakeholders actually participating in the decision-making processes of the arrangement. The first step to become involved in the RTRS is to apply for membership of the organization in one of the following member-categories: producers; industry, finance and trade; or civil society. Our stakeholder analysis
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
To see whether the results for the RTRS have a wider application beyond this case, this article presents a quick scan of the deliberative capacity of a second Roundtable: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The architecture of this Roundtable is very similar to that of the RTRS and it is partly driven by the same actors, including WWF, Unilever and Solidaridad. The RSPO is generally considered the most mature Roundtable and was initiated by WWF-Switzerland in reaction to severe
Conclusions
The democratic quality of private multi-stakeholder governance is an important subject of academic and political debate. On the one hand, private multi-stakeholder arrangements are seen as part of a ‘deliberative turn’ and a way of democratizing international environmental governance. On the other hand, the democratic potential of these arrangements has been heavily criticized and interpreted as a privatization of what should be public. To nuance this debate on democratic challenges that are
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for funding this research.
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