In January 2022, the UK National Contact Point (UK NCP) issued a final statement in a specific instance claim brought against Bonsucro, a multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI) that aims to promote sustainable production of sugarcane. The claim alleged that Bonsucro had failed to comply with the OECD Guidelines because it had not carried out appropriate due diligence towards one of its members, accused of human rights abuses. While NCP complaints had been brought against MSIs and certifiers before, the UK NCP’s final statement is the first to recognize the leverage MSIs have over members due to their ability to deny membership and related reputational benefits to companies wishing to show sustainability logos, and to affirm their responsibility to use this leverage to avoid abuses. The statement sheds light on the accountability of actors involved in private voluntary sustainability standard systems, with possible impacts on other actors such as third-party certifiers.

This article presents an empirical study of six grievance mechanisms in multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). It argues that key characteristics of each grievance mechanism as well as the contexts in which they operate significantly affect human rights outcomes. However, even the most successful mechanisms only manage to produce remedies in particular types of cases and contexts. The research also finds that it is prohibitively difficult to determine whether ‘effective’ remedy has been achieved in individual cases. Furthermore, the key intervention by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), to prescribe a set of effectiveness criteria for designing or revising MSI grievance mechanisms, itself appears ineffective in stimulating better outcomes for rights-holders. Drawing on these findings, the article reflects on the future potential and limitations of MSI grievance mechanisms within broader struggles to ensure business respect for human rights.

Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs)—private governance mechanisms involving firms, civil society organizations, and other actors deliberating to set rules, such as standards or codes of conduct, with which firms comply voluntarily—have become important tools for governing global business activities and the social and environmental consequences of these activities. Yet, this growth is paralleled with concerns about MSIs’ deliberative capacity, including the limited inclusion of some marginalized stakeholders, bias toward corporate interests, and, ultimately, ineffectiveness in their role as regulators. In this article, we conceptualize MSIs as deliberative systems to open the black box of the different elements that make up the MSI polity and better understand how their deliberative capacity hinges on problems in different elements. On the basis of this conceptualization, we examine how deliberative mini-publics—forums in which a randomly selected group of individuals from a particular population engage in learning and facilitated deliberations about a topic—can improve the deliberative capacity of MSIs.

This article studies multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as spaces for both deliberation and contestation between constituencies with competing discourses and disputed values, beliefs, and preferences. We review different theoretical perspectives on MSIs, which see them mainly as spaces to find solutions to market problems (economic approach), as spaces of conflict and bargaining (political approach), or as spaces of consensus (deliberative approach). In contrast, we build on a contestatory deliberative perspective, which gives equal value to both contestation and consensus. We identify four types of internal contestation which can be present in MSIs—procedural, inclusiveness, epistemic, and ultimate-goal—and argue that embracing contestation and engaging in ongoing revision of provisional agreements, criteria, and goals can enhance the democratic quality of MSIs. Finally, we explore the implications of this perspective for theorizing about the democratic quality in MSIs and about the role of corporations in transnational governance.

The profound influence of Thomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee’s integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) on the field of business ethics has been challenged by Andreas Scherer and Guido Palazzo’s Habermasian approach, which has achieved prominence of late with articles that expressly question the defensibility of ISCT’s hypernorms. This article builds on recent efforts by Donaldson and Scherer to bridge their accounts by providing discursive foundations to the hypernorms at the heart of the ISCT framework. Extending prior literature, we propose an ISCT* framework designed to retain ISCT’s practical virtue of managerial guidance while answering the demands of Scherer and Palazzo’s discursive account. By subscribing to a suitable portfolio of discursively justified hypernorms, we argue, companies unlock the valuable moral guidance of ISCT*, which says to treat these hypernorms as unequivocal outer bounds to the pursuit of business and as a starting point to tailor local norms through discursive stakeholder engagement.

Global multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) are important instruments that have the potential to improve the social and environmental sustainability of global supply chains. However, they often fail to comprehensively address the needs and interests of various supply-chain participants. While voluntary in nature, MSIs have most often been implemented through coercive approaches, resulting in friction among their participants and in systemic problems with decoupling. Additionally, in those cases in which deliberation was constrained between and amongst participants, collaborative approaches have often failed to materialize. Our framework focuses on two key aspects of these breakdowns: assumptions about the orientation of MSI participants, and the deliberation processes that participants use to engage with each other to create these initiatives and sustain them over time. Drawing from stakeholder and deliberation theories, we revisit the concept of MSIs and show how their deliberative capacity may be enhanced in order to encourage participants to collaborate voluntarily.

Large companies can have both massively positive and massively negative impacts on communities, be it directly through their operations or indirectly through their influence on decision-makers. This is particularly true when business operations take place in conflict-affected or high-risk areas. Humanitarian organisations endeavouring to bring protection and/or assistance in these areas cannot, therefore, ignore these influential actors. Engagement with business actors – as well as with any other societal actor – should be framed within a clear rationale in order to deliver positive results. This article introduces the rationale that has been developed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and offers some examples of past engagement between the ICRC and business actors. It notes that occasions for humanitarian organisations to engage with business actors are likely to become more frequent in the coming years and argues that this trend, if properly managed, offers humanitarian organisations opportunities to leverage energies, know-how, and resources from the business sector for the benefit of the persons and communities that humanitarian organisations strive to protect and assist.

Growing reliance on ‘multi-stakeholder initiatives’ (MSIs) aimed at improving business performance with respect to specific human rights-related challenges has become a significant dimension of the evolving corporate responsibility agenda over recent decades. A number of such initiatives have developed in direct response to calls for greater state and corporate accountability in areas of weak governance and violent conflict. This article examines the evolution of key MSIs in light of the 2011 adoption of the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and addresses challenges facing these initiatives in the future.

This paper extends scholarship on multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in the context of corporate social responsibility in three ways. First, I outline a framework to analyze the strength of couplings between actors participating in MSIs. Characterizing an MSI as consisting of numerous local networks that are embedded in a wider global network, I argue that tighter couplings (within local networks) and looser couplings (between local networks) coexist. Second, I suggest that this coexistence of couplings enables MSIs to generate policy outcomes which address the conditions of a transnational regulatory context. I argue that MSIs’ way of organizing enables them to cope with three challenges: the stability, flexibility, and legitimacy of governance. Reflecting on these challenges, the article identifies a number of problems related to MSIs’ role in transnational governance. Third, I discuss the UN Global Compact as an illustrative case and examine problems and opportunities related to its stability, flexibility, and legitimacy.