Outlining a Guide for Multistakeholder Approaches to Global Governance

The Stanley Center, One Earth Future, and the Sié Center at the University of Denver, will co-host the workshop “Outlining a Guide for Multistakeholder Approaches to Global Governance.”

Cooperative multistakeholder action is a newly vital area of global governance, but one where key developments are often not understood. We define cooperative multistakeholder action in global governance as the following:

Transnational and multi-actor coalitions which combine states, international organizations, and nonstate actors that seek to strengthen and promote new international norms and achieve responses to policy challenges.

The Stanley Center plans to produce a 25–30 page document that will help advocates and officials better understand and use multistakeholder approaches to global governance to achieve policy change. This workshop will bring together a small number of 7–10 participants to produce an outline for this document that will:

• Place cooperative multistakeholder action in the context of global governance as a viable approach to policy change, able to break through gridlock and gain legitimacy, and is here to stay.
• Provide guiding principles that call for expansive engagement in consulting actors, flexible framing and reframing of policy efforts, accountability to those affected, and empowerment of unseen, local, and marginalized groups.
• Describe the “craft” of multistakeholder processes in global governance that would include the following:
  • Defining institutional roles in a multistakeholder global governance setting and how composition matters to form.
  • Individual and institutional facilitation and leadership skills.
  • Prescriptions for various functions of multistakeholder processes in a global governance setting: agenda setting, negotiation, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, etc.
• Learn from and suggest global policy issues that practitioners can take on.