The moral legitimation of multi-stakeholder Initiatives: The case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)

Multistakeholder Initiatives (MSI's) fill an important role in the governance of transnational sustainability issues, but ongoing serious criticism can threaten their legitimacy. Given its importance for impact and performance, we adopt a “legitimacy as process” perspective to examine MSI moral legitimation. Combining the literature on MSIs with legitimacy theory, we conduct an in-depth case study of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) between 2004 and 2015 across three organizational development stages. We use news media to measure moral legitimacy and concurrently analyze the RSPO response to legitimacy challenges through the content of internal documentation. We find that moral legitimacy challenges revolve around three main criteria: (1) sustainability performance (of the organization and of its members), (2) procedural deficiencies and (3) market issues (coverage and growth). Types of moral legitimacy were important at different stages of organizational development -procedural in the nascent stage, procedural and structural in the growth stage and all three, procedural, consequential and structural in the towards maturity stage. As the organization evolved, the RSPO improved its management of moral legitimacy, moving from a passive approach in the nascent stage to actively and publicly responding to moral legitimacy challenges in the towards maturity stage. During all stages, moral legitimacy was managed by making substantive changes with evidence of moral entrapment and creeping commitment as stakeholder demands were incorporated into organizational processes. • Using the case of RSPO we investigate MSI moral legitimacy across three developmental stages. • Moral legitimacy evaluation criteria related to performance, procedures and market. • We find a temporal dimension to the emergence of three types of moral legitimacy. • RSPO Moral legitimacy managed by making substantive changes to incorporate concerns.