Multistakeholderism and Human Rights: A Call for an Anthropological Approach

Abstract

1. Introduction

How does the rise of multistakeholder processes (MSPs) in global governance influence the protection and promotion of human rights? The past 30 years have seen the rapid spread and growth of MSPs (Bull and McNeill 2019). Through these processes, corporations, governments, civil society organizations (CSOs), academics, labour unions, and private philanthropies, among others, convene to develop norms and standards, as well as channel financing to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to promote development. However, views on MSPs as venues for decision-making diverge sharply. Proponents and critics find little common ground.

Champions of multistakeholder governance see MSPs as offering opportunities to bring diverse powerholders together to find practical solutions and thus progress on challenging objectives. Critics see these platforms as favouring the interests of private actors, especially the private sector, thus deepening structural inequalities (Shamir 2008; McKeon 2017; Manahan and Kumar 2022). But both proponents and critics may overlook the constitutive effects of these processes on civil society representatives and their practices of rights advocacy. As new platforms for governance are established, so too are new alliances and relations of power. We ask: how are MSPs influencing human rights activists’ identities, strategies, and interpretations of rights?

We propose that an ethnographic approach could help to change the way that we understand MSPs and their effects on human rights. In considering what questions this approach could explore, we build on socio-legal scholarship on rights mobilization that adopts a ‘ground-up’ perspective of those mobilizing rights, rather than more institutional, ‘top-down’ perspectives; and on anthropological literature that seeks to understand how advocates of rights in diverse settings may ‘vernacularize’ or translate rights norms with both upstream and downstream effects.

In doing so, we draw on our shared experience as observers and participants of MSPs whose work has been closely aligned with social movements in global health and global food security. We argue that recentring the experiences and perspectives of civil society and community representatives in these governance mechanisms could offer an important perspective on the effects of MSPs on broader social and economic transformations.

In the following sections, we begin with background to the rise of MSPs and critiques of them by human rights scholars. After, we describe how a socio-legal and anthropological approach to human rights offers a different approach to understanding these institutional changes. We suggest that a more emic, nuanced, and empirical understanding of the practice of human rights in MSPs can illuminate the creation of new civil society constituencies, the way civil society draws on the affective and aesthetic dimensions of rights to exercise moral power, and how MSPs are affording potential opportunities to transform the meaning of human rights.

2. Background: the rise of MSPs and related critiques

In recent decades, multistakeholderism has steadily emerged as a key framework of transnational regulation. The proliferation of multistakeholderism in global governance has generated concerns over the power that such arrangements endow to already powerful actors. Yet as we argue in this section, MSPs also offer civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) a seat at the table where decisions are made. They offer the promise of space to mobilize power through new constituencies and to make demands that can potentially influence MSP decisions and establish new norms.

The term multistakeholderism signifies a fundamental transformation in dominant state-centred models of regulation and forms of public authority wherein non-state actors are increasingly recognized as ‘stakeholders’ entitled to participate in regulatory and policy-making processes. Raymond and DeNardis define multistakeholderism as ‘two or more classes of actors engaged in a common governance enterprise concerning issues they regard as public in nature, and characterized by polyarchic authority relations constituted by procedural rules’ (2015: 573). Scholars refer to instances of multistakeholderism by different names—sometimes multistakeholder partnerships, initiatives, or governance. We use the term MSPs as an inclusive term to describe all of these various institutionalized forms of multistakeholderism.

The structures of MSPs vary in scope, scale, and form. Some operate at very local levels, while others seek to tackle global challenges. Well-known examples of the latter include the Marine Stewardship Council, which brings together the seafood industry, NGOs, scientists, and academics to address overfishing; and the Rainforest Alliance, which convenes farmers and forest communities with companies, governments, and individuals to address environmental protection. Such processes typically rely on deliberative processes to facilitate compliance through consensus-based non-binding norms, such as codes of conduct and soft law.

In 2002, the Commission for Sustainable Development responded to demands by NGOs to formally embrace multistakeholderism as a model (Bäckstrand 2006). Since then, MSPs have become a new norm across the UN (Gleckman 2018; Reinsberg and Westerwinter 2021). Proponents suggest that such collaborative approaches with the private and voluntary sectors are more effective in generating ownership of decisions than regulation enforced through coercion, particularly in the context of contemporary transnational problems and geographically dispersed supply chains (Li et al. 2020; World Economic Forum 2022).

Yet the proliferation of MSPs has also generated concerns. First, critics contend that the turn to multistakeholderism reflects and promotes a neoliberal rationality, which Brown (2015) argues reconfigures human subjects primarily as market actors, rather than ‘rights-holders’ who have legal rights to demand state action under binding international human rights treaties. The replacement of interest groups with ‘stakeholders’, she contends, ‘vanquish[es] a vocabulary of power, and hence power’s visibility, from the lives and venues that governance organizes and directs’ (2015: 129). Similarly, Uribe contends that the managerial practices of MSPs, which aim to optimize decisions through consensus, evades ‘the socio-political dimensions of problems and instead prioritizes problem-solving questions that are less contentious’ (2024: 2).

Second, critics also note that the assumption of formal equality among different stakeholders on MSPs elides the reality of power asymmetries. Empirical scholarship on MSPs has largely corroborated this argument (Cheyns and Riisgaard 2014; Fortin 2018; Schuster and Mossig 2022). Scholars have shown how MSPs are embedded in unequal global power relations that shape which kinds of standards are enforceable and monitored (Fransen and Kolk 2007; Bartley 2018). Critics have also argued that MSPs whitewash unethical corporate practices, build in weak accountability, and conceal conflicts of interest (McKeon 2017; Buxton, 2019; Uribe 2024). The role of private foundations, in particular the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has drawn particular attention. Harman (2016) points to its outsize influence in shaping health priorities for LMICs. Similarly, Blunt (2022) critiques the role of the Gates Foundation in both producing knowledge and shaping epistemic power in global health.

Inequalities amongst states are structurally encoded and even exacerbated in MSPs. Powerful governments may instrumentalize human rights and bilateral overseas development assistance to carry out foreign policy agendas (Neumayer 2003). High-income donor states may also use multistakeholder platforms to shape LMIC priorities (Aly 2022).

All these criticisms have led civil society and researchers to raise concerns that by participating in MSPs, civil society may give legitimacy to processes in which they not only lack the power to meaningfully promote human rights, and which undermine human rights norms and systems, weakening the role of member states. MSPs may displace binding human rights law, substituting negotiated agreements on platforms that are not formally accountable for legally binding obligations on states party to human rights treaties. In one prominent example, the Institute for Multistakeholder Integrity Initiative concluded that MSPs ‘employ a top-down approach to addressing human rights concerns, which fails to centre the needs, desires, or voices of rights holders’ (MSI Integrity 2020: 5). They argued that MSPs are incongruent with a human rights-based approach, which includes elements including transparency, monitoring, and access to remedy.

We share all the concerns raised by scholars and social movements. At the same time, in our experience as practitioners, we have seen that many CSOs and NGOs continue to participate in MSPs. We argue that more attention should focus on the lived experience of civil society representatives who participate in MSPs, to understand how they experience these power disparities, and how they contend with them. While definitions of civil society vary, here we draw on the United Nations’ definition, which loosely groups CSOs and NGOs as ‘any non-profit, voluntary citizens’ group which is organized at a local, national or international level’ (United Nations n.d.). By definition, voluntary groups involve people who exercise agency; but the criticism of MSPs could lead a reader to conclude that all civil society representatives who participate in MSPs are disempowered. MSPs offer civil society and NGOs a seat at the table where decisions are made and offer the possibility to mobilize power through new constituencies, potentially affecting social change.

Are all civil society representatives who participate in MSPs co-opted, or are civil society representatives sometimes able to mobilize and exercise a meaningful voice in decision-making, advancing the interests of the constituencies they are meant to represent? And if so, how do they accomplish this? To develop answers to these questions, we see a need to probe more deeply, gather more empirical insights, and understand what happens at that table: the ways in which civil society representatives engage in multistakeholder platforms, how and whether they are able to effectively accumulate and deploy different forms of power when faced with outsized opponents at the negotiating table, and how they strive to translate and re-make human rights in these increasingly significant governance spaces.

The way forward may in part be methodological in nature. The scholarship on multistakeholderism has predominantly examined its origins, effectiveness, and actors’ perceptions of its legitimacy, frequently emphasizing the shortcomings in the latter two areas (Higham et al. 2024). For example, Okereke and Stacewicz interviewed participants of ‘sustainability roundtables’, including the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the Roundtable on Responsible Soy, the Better Cotton initiative, and the Forest Stewardship Council. They find that stakeholders have uneven perceptions of the effectiveness of these processes, which they suggest may be a product of the ‘uneven and inconsistent’ monitoring and evaluation processes (Okereke and Stacewicz 2018: 1313). While such studies have been productive in identifying gaps and suggesting procedural improvements, their emphasis on evaluating institutional processes may inadvertently overlook the significant constitutive effects of participation, a focus that contributes to the often-critical assessment of MSPs.

Socio-legal studies have encountered similar limitations. In the face of sceptical assessments of the ability of courts to contribute to social transformation (Rosenberg 1993), socio-legal scholars critiqued the ‘top-down’, institution-centred analyses of social change for adopting an overly linear and instrumental understanding of social transformation that invests unrealistic expectations of the transformative potential of hegemonic institutions (McCann 1996). Instead, socio-legal scholars suggested that ground-up analyses—particularly those drawing on ethnographic methods—could illuminate how political and legal institutional processes have productive effects on movement formation, rights consciousness, and social expectations of entitlements (McCann 1994). A resulting body of socio-legal studies has helped to shed light on how law is produced and experienced in practice. We believe similar learning could result from applying this approach to MSPs.

In the next section, we build on these insights by drawing from the work of anthropologists who use ethnographic research to examine human rights as a dynamic field of practice and power relations. Their work reveals that the effects of human rights extend beyond policy enforcement and implementation, actively reshaping social identities and relationships. Rights advocates play a central role in these acts of translation, ‘vernacularizing’ rights to mobilize collectivities and advocate for change. If we centre their perspectives, the shift in the field of vision might be revealing.

3. Studying human rights in multistakeholderism: proposal for an anthropological approach

Anthropologists approach human rights as a dynamic discourse through which power relations are both constructed and contested. By conducting ethnographic fieldwork in institutions where human rights are legally articulated and enforced, as well as in communities mobilizing for their rights or enduring violations, anthropologists examine how human rights concepts and language intersect with local vernaculars and cultural norms. A significant contribution of the anthropology of human rights is its emphasis on viewing human rights as a socio-cultural ‘practice’: a set of performances, meanings, aesthetics, and strategies that are shaped by social and institutional context and that can be studied in situ through ethnographic research (Goodale and Merry 2007). Thus, rather than adopting a priori understandings of human rights or theories of international law, anthropologists take a relational approach to understanding power.

Here we draw on ethnographic research on the practice of human rights to identify three areas where we see dominant institutional meanings and discourses interacting with alternate conceptions. We suggest three areas where socio-legal and anthropological approaches to the constitutive role of human rights claims could enhance the analysis of MSPs and propose three questions for future research:

3.1 How do MSPs shape the subjectivities of the civil society representatives who participate in them, creating opportunities for mobilization of new constituencies?

Anthropologists have explored how the framing of ideas as global human rights norms shapes the way people view themselves and their relations to others. Ethnographic research has investigated how human rights language interacts with people’s lives, transforming and producing new kinds of subjectivities as they encounter these rights (Celermajer and Lefebvre 2020). While much research has focused on the way people in different social contexts encounter, and either embrace or resist, Western categories of the individual self—for example, women (Merry 2009) or children (Luttrell-Rowland 2023)—anthropological scholarship has also explored the way in which human rights can serve to produce new collective subjects, forming new alliances that can claim power. For example, Emma Nyhan (2021) describes how Bedouin peoples in Israel/Palestine experiment with the language of indigeneity, which can re-frame their relation and attachment to other peoples in the region.

By including civil society and community representatives—including those ‘most affected’ by a particular issue—MSPs create new roles for groups to redefine themselves in relation to others, collaborating across national borders to shape the positions their representatives adopt in global governance mechanisms. While, in some cases, participants in MSI may serve as individuals and advance their own institutional advocacy priorities, in other cases, groups may create new structures such as broader delegations or constituencies. While the term ‘constituency’ was once largely defined geographically in relationship to the territorial nation-state, MSPs offer opportunities for groups across transnational boundaries to constitute themselves as political communities as well as to redefine their relations and entitlements vis-à-vis other groups and actors (Saward 2005). This constitutive potential of multistakeholderism involves creating new types of political subjects, with implications not only for multistakeholder processes but also for local mobilization and interactions among and between communities and other actors.

An example can be found in the context of global food governance. In 2007, the world experienced a global food crisis. During this period, transnational agrarian movements such as La Vía Campesina (LVC), the International Peasant Movement, called on the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in Rome to reform its structure to enable greater participation by those most affected by the food crisis. As a result, in 2009, the CFS engaged in a reform that included several ‘stakeholder’ groups as participants in the CFS, including CSOs and the private sector. Both stakeholders were allowed to self-organize their participation through autonomous platforms: the Private Sector Mechanism and the Civil Society Mechanism (later changed to the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism or CSIPM).

The CSIPM had full control to design the structure and processes of its mechanism, defining 11 constituencies across 17 sub-regions based on a model that had been first experimented with in an international social movement platform, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (Conti 2023). These constituencies include smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, agricultural and food workers, landless, women, youth, consumers, the urban food insecure, and NGOs. Importantly, NGOs were included separately because the CSIPM gives preference to social movements and networks through which these groups directly represent themselves. This organization served to ‘identify, protect, foster and guarantee the autonomy of movements and organizations representing different groups of people with distinct identities and lived realities’ (Claeys and Duncan 2019, 1).

Since the reform, these constituencies have been challenging their representation as mere stakeholders of food security policy, and have instead insisted that they are rights-holders to which other actors should be accountable (Canfield 2018). In 2018, when the CSIPM sought to challenge what it perceived as growing threats to their voices on the Committee, they issued a statement clearly articulating their understanding of themselves. Read on the floor of the CFS, the CSIPM declared, ‘We, the people, are the most critical agents for change. We are the organizations of the rights-holders while governments and intergovernmental institutions are duty-bearers. We are the most important producers, processors, and providers of food and nutrition worldwide’.¹ The statement reflected competing logics and understandings of the CFS—one which viewed all actors as equal stakeholders and another which saw the CFS as a space for rights-holders to hold all transnational actors accountable for ensuring food security.

Through the requirement to include representatives of groups not previously identified within human rights institutions as subjects of rights—from peasants in the context of global food security governance, to persons living with HIV in the context of global health governance—multistakeholderism can thus produce new rights subjects that group themselves as new ‘constituencies’ of global governance, building their own consensus positions across diverse interests and localities.

Ethnographic research with groups and communities participating in MSPs could thus reveal how such processes change the way that people understand themselves in relation to others, and how they establish new norms for representation, consultation, and accountability. It could help to illuminate how members and representatives of civil society constituencies experience these new forms of subjectivity, and how they position themselves relevant to other constituencies. This understanding could also have profound implications beyond MSPs, as these groups claim rights in other spaces as well.

3.2 How do civil society representatives influence power relations in MSPs, for instance, by accumulating and deploying ‘moral power?’

The language of law and human rights is often presented as rational, impartial, and abstract: an ‘exercise of power’ through law that ‘creates subjects and defines a context of injustice which demands to be put right’ (Wilson 2009). But power is multiform and can be mobilized in a variety of ways. In her typology of forms of power in global governance, Moon (2019) identifies these as including ‘physical, economic, structural, institutional, moral, discursive, expert, and network’ power.

‘Moral power’, which she sees as related to Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, ‘is wielded when an actor shapes the principles that others believe to be right or wrong, and the actions that may then follow…[it] may also be wielded “from below,” as when grassroots activists build social movements that change broader norms regarding what is acceptable in society’ (2019: 6).

Arguably, moral power may be most effectively exercised by those with little of the other forms of power, whose demands may be viewed as altruistic. Someone who exercises moral power implicitly appeals to underlying shared values or principles that risk being forgotten when individual interests are prioritized, as well as to a capacity for both shame and pride. Moral power is therefore at least in part affective in nature.

Ethnographic research could help to illuminate ways civil society representatives in MSPs work to engage affective and aesthetic approaches to mobilizing, developing, and exercising moral power. It may also reveal how civil society representatives draw on moral power to build alliances within and among constituencies, in order to contend with the agendas advanced in governance mechanisms by more economically and politically powerful states, private foundations, and private companies.

Previous ethnographic research in other settings has illuminated the affective dimensions through which law and power operate (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017; Billaud and Cowan 2020). These studies are based on the supposition that affect, emotions, and feelings constitute a central, but overlooked dimension through which projects of power are assembled. In her study of ‘affective justice’ and the International Criminal Court, Kamari Clarke argues that ‘international justice mobilizations do not gain their power through singular and formalized law-making processes …. Rather, they gain their power through the conjunctures amongst legal ephemeral, and embodied imaginaries’ (Clarke 2019: 5). She draws our attention away from simply the meaning of rights, emphasizing how emotional articulations, embodied processes, and sensorial aspects of rights play a key role in the constitution of political and legal institution, which can be ‘examined through observations of how affects are legally materialized, discursively and performatively’ (2019: 6). Elsewhere, medical anthropologists have explored how affective dimensions of human rights are used in advocacy, as with early collectives of people living with HIV in West Africa who testified about their personal suffering to back claims for medical resources (Nguyen 2010); or in the use of emotions by queer activists in Myanmar to forge ties and build mutually supportive advocacy networks Chua (2018).

One of us has observed this informally through her participation in global HIV governance mechanisms. Both the Joint UN Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS), and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria have seats for civil society and community delegations on their multistakeholder governance mechanisms. These civil society delegations can wield significant influence through oratory: powerful statements on the record that reaffirm human rights and remind member state delegates of the real-world impact of their decisions on affected communities. In one potent example, the semi-annual Board meeting of the Global Fund often begins with a candle-lighting ceremony to commemorate people living with HIV, people with tuberculosis or malaria who have passed away. The candle stays lit for the duration of the Board meeting, and sometimes sits beside the Board member who represents a civil society or community delegation. The Board member thus speaks with added moral power when making her or his interventions at the Board table. Civil society delegations also draft papers, have input into board agendas, and lobby member states and UN officials in the corridors to support or block decisions. Their participation gives such agencies legitimacy, by implicitly threatening to remove the moral power behind their symbolic capital if the agency falls short (Davis 2020).

In the context of MSPs, moral power exercised by civil society may translate into other forms of power; for instance, the power to coordinate actions to lobby donor states to pledge funds to large international HIV agencies during those agencies’ periodic resource mobilization efforts. The use of moral power to sway decision-makers may be heartfelt, and it may also be strategic, as Cowan observes in another context (2009: 324).

Ethnographic research could thus reveal the nuanced ways in which civil society actors draw on affective ties of solidarity, visual symbolism, personal testimony, and other tactics in order to mobilize and exercise moral power.

3.3 How do civil society representatives transform the meanings of human rights through their participation in MSPs?

Thirdly, anthropologists have illuminated how the meanings of human rights transform over time through the interaction between human rights professionals, activists, and states. Although the meanings of rights are often represented as stable and unchanging, anthropologists emphasize that their meaning is a product of the dynamic interplay between competing actors and interests. Building on this, a growing field of scholarship illuminates how activists, social movements, and civil societies reconceive human rights from the ground-up, imbuing rights with new meanings (Rajagopal 2003; Ife 2009; Rodríguez-Garavito 2021b). Ethnographic research has focused specifically on how activists and social movements translate and transplant norms and interventions into diverse contexts, using local language to re-frame their claims and transform social relations of power (Merry 2008). For example, Merry (2006) explores the dynamic interpretative practices of defining rights that occur at multiple scales of social relations, from grassroots communities to international arenas (such as the transnational networks and mechanisms that implement human rights treaties), and applies ethnographic research to study the processes of ‘vernacularization’ through which activists and other actors seek to make human rights meaningful for local communities (Destrooper and Merry 2018). The ethnographic study of human rights claims has illuminated diverse experiences of and uses of power, as well as instances where rhetorical United Nations commitments to a ‘human rights-based approach’ were experienced as ‘non-empowering’ by advocates (Destrooper and Merry 2018).

As social movements and CSOs creatively engage with MSPs to produce new constituencies, they may also redefine or reconstruct the meanings of human rights. An example of this is advocacy by civil society for the right to participation, a human right grounded in other civil and political rights. In the global HIV response, the right to participation derives from the 1980s, when a US-based committee of people living with HIV issued the Denver Principles, which condemned ‘attempts to label us as “victims”, a term which implies defeat’, and demanded involvement ‘at every level of decision-making’. In 2001, the UN General Assembly formally endorsed the resulting Greater Inclusion of People with AIDS (GIPA) Principle. This has been re-stated in every subsequent UN High-level Meeting on HIV. The GIPA Principle is understood as a soft law commitment to ‘full inclusion of people living with HIV in decision-making that affects us’ (Sprague et al. 2019). Global governance mechanisms have now incorporated ‘communities’ delegations in member state-led platforms: beginning in 1996, when the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) passed a resolution establishing UNAIDS, its Programme Coordinating Board reserved seats for a delegation of NGOs (UNAIDS 2020), including five NGOs, three from ‘developing countries’, and two from ‘developed countries, or countries with economies in transition’ (UNAIDS 2020).²

In translating their visions of social justice into the language of human rights, some movements have also produced new participatory practices that promote inclusion. For example, Indigenous peoples have demanded ‘Free Prior and Informed Consent’ to protect and institutionalize their rights (Leifsen et al. 2017; Cabrera Silva 2023). Diverse marginalized groups have demanded a voice in decision-making, from disability rights activists to sex workers, who have said, ‘Nothing about us without us’: no decision should be made on behalf of a group without the direct participation of that group (Charlton 1998).

Global food governance offers a different example of the redefinition of rights. In response to the establishment of the World Trade Organization, LVC articulated a new vision of global food production and provisioning through the claim of ‘food sovereignty’. This claim was articulated in opposition to the dominant, ‘food security’, paradigm of food governance, which civil society representatives argued was overly focused on production and legitimized the WTO’s neoliberal approach. However, in articulating this claim, LVC also sought to challenge existing interpretations and practices of the human right to food, which they saw as overly individualistic, technical, and legalistic (Claeys 2015; Canfield 2022). As they advocated to transform food systems, they often found themselves in tension with NGOs from the Global North that had typically advocated in international organizations around issues of global hunger.

Through the claim of food sovereignty, movements sought to inject the voices of those most affected directly into global governance. In 2004, LVC and allied transnational agrarian movements had their chance to do just that when they participated in negotiating the Voluntary Guidelines on the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Through their participation, they were not only able to include key issues like collective rights over seeds and natural resources, but also strengthened the participatory dimensions of the right to food. Indeed, participation was mentioned no less than 13 times in the final Guidelines. This participatory element of the right to food laid the groundwork for the reform of the CFS 5 years later, when food sovereignty movements mobilized the language of the right to food to substantively and procedurally open up global food governance to be more attentive to those most affected by agricultural systems and food insecurity.

As the claim of ‘food sovereignty’ spread globally, activists have invigorated and radicalized the right to food. They translated the right to food from an abstract right, which powerful institutions argued could be fulfilled through neoliberal economic models, to a set of duties that states needed to fulfill to key rights-holders. As Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri writes, ‘La Vía Campesina deployed food sovereignty as a way to claim and redefine the right to food, and this changed the meaning of the concepts at play’ (Fakhri 2019: 25).

Efforts to reinterpret and implement human rights norms within MSPs can also influence the legal obligations of participating institutions. For example, the Global Fund’s application of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to their contractual agreements with countries that receive health financing arguably extends the obligations of states party to human rights treaty in MSP mechanisms (Jürgens et al. 2017).

As these examples show, MSPs offer new opportunities for CSOs to translate their rights claims. These translations into the shifting institutional structures of global governance are enabling new constituencies to shape social expectations of participation, as well as to influence dominant interpretations of how rights should be implemented and the responsibility they entail. Further research could examine the forms of translation that not only happen within MSPs, but across them as CSOs increasingly mobilize to transform the structure and practice of multistakeholderism on global and local scales. Ethnographic research could also help to illuminate how civil society representatives negotiate proximity to other forms of power and negotiate both real and perceived conflicts of interest; how and when they decide to compromise, and how they form relationships of convenience with others on MSPs in order to push decisions through.

4. Conclusion

At a moment when human rights and international development are increasingly under attack, does introducing human rights into multistakeholder governance mechanisms water down human rights law, or does it, by contrast, represent an expansion of human rights standards into new forms and spaces? When and how can movements effectively translate grassroots understandings ‘upstream’ into international norms? Our analysis suggests that while scholars and activists are right to be concerned about the impact of MSPs on human rights, the shift towards multistakeholderism is not necessarily an example of what Hopgood (2013) calls the ‘end times’ of human rights. Rather, advocates may be developing new strategies in response to the changing forms and politics of global governance, and further research is needed to better understand these strategies and their effectiveness.

Thus, we argue that these platforms constitute an important site of ethnographic study. Future research will help to develop a more robust and nuanced understanding of how civil society and NGOs translate human rights in global governance; how the meanings of human rights are being expanded and re-negotiated; and how these in turn generate new norms. Building on anthropological scholarship on human rights ‘translation’ (Merry 2006; Sarfaty 2012; Turem and Ballestero 2014), we call for greater attention to how, even in quite distinct arenas, social movements can successfully influence multistakeholder mechanisms by translating their own visions of social justice into human rights language. As we have described, both HIV activists and food sovereignty movements successfully built powerful movements around new identities and constituencies of people most affected by their respective crises to deploy what Moon (2019) calls ‘moral power’ in global governance. Our analysis suggests that as these movements engaged in their respective areas of global governance and mobilized human rights, they have been able to construct political constituencies of rights-holders on which the legitimacy—and in some cases, the financing—of the multistakeholder mechanisms we study depend. Hence, by attending to the processes by which movements translated their social justice claims into the language of human rights, they were able to expand and reconstruct the mandate of human rights into new spaces of multistakeholder transnational cooperation.

However, our analysis has certain limitations. It draws on our observations of global food and health governance—fields shaped in response to distinct global crises, which have influenced the structures and missions of the institutions we examined. While these fields exhibit differences, they also contrast with many other spaces where multistakeholderism has proliferated—arenas that are often less visible, smaller in scale, and more technically focused. The wide variation in the scope, scale, and forms of multistakeholderism complicates any attempt to make sweeping statements about its political implications. Furthermore, this variability makes it nearly impossible for civil society to engage consistently and with equal vigour across all arenas.

Moreover, in both our examples we find the political ground won is now under threat. Indeed, in both global food and global health governance, we have witnessed significant changes since the COVID-19 pandemic in which powerful actors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and other actors have sought to restructure multistakeholder processes and institutions and diminish civil society voices (Montenegro de Wit et al. 2021). Many movements have suggested that multistakeholder bodies are marginalizing human rights-based approaches, thus facilitating sharp critiques of current multistakeholder approaches.

Ultimately, we do not seek to answer the question of whether multistakeholder approaches do or do not enhance protection, enjoyment, and enforcement of human rights. Rather, we seek to draw attention to the creative ways in which civil society actors are mobilizing in and around these bodies. Ethnographic attention to the way civil society is engaging with multistakeholderism can not only provide new insights into the impacts and effectiveness of MSPs, but also can offer important lessons about changing practices of human rights. As scholars have recently argued, human rights must be ‘reinvented’ if it is to be applicable to evolving geopolitical, ecological, and economic and technological challenges (Rodríguez-Garavito 2021a; Goodale 2022). Critiques of multistakeholderism that adopt an overly legalistic view of human rights, rather than attending to the generative, strategic, and transformative ways that civil society is leveraging such institutions may overlook key sites where such revitalization is taking place.

Acknowledgements

This article was developed through a workshop on Multistakeholder Governance and Human Rights organized by Matthew Canfield and Phillip Paiement on 8 April 2022 at Asser Institute, the Hague. Sara L.M. Davis benefited from discussions in a meeting on multistakeholderism convened online in 2022 by Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2), as well as with Courtenay Howe, Allan Maleche, and Mike Podmore.

Conflict of Interest

Nothing to declare.

Funding

No funding was received for this work.

Footnotes

References