Multistakeholderism and Human Rights: A Call for an Anthropological Approach

Abstract Multistakeholder processes (MSPs) are fast becoming the primary form of collaboration across many fields of global governance. Proponents argue MSPs enable meaningful participation, transparency, and collective ownership of decisions, while critics claim they dilute state accountability and empower private actors at the expense of the public good. To date, however, there has been little study of the experience of civil society and community advocates who participate in these processes in order to promote human rights, and what these advocates see as the merits or shortfalls of different forms of multistakeholderism. Drawing on socio-legal and anthropological studies, as well as our experiences as scholar-activists within MSPs, this paper foregrounds the role of civil society representatives. We argue that an ethnographic approach to studying MSPs can provide more nuanced, empirically grounded insights into the evolving relationship between human rights and global governance. We propose three areas for greater research: (1) how MSPs shape the subjectivities of civil society participants and how this may produce new transnational constituencies; (2) how participants in MSPs use aesthetic and affective aspects of human rights to exercise moral power; and, (3) how MSPs afford civil society and social movements the opportunity to transform the meanings of human rights.