Deliberation Without Democracy in Multi-stakeholder Initiatives: A Pragmatic Way Forward
指出多利益相关方倡议中追求民主合法性会导致企业参与激励下降的悖论，主张放弃民主合法性目标，转而采用实用主义方法，强调协商在提升监管有效性中的作用。
Abstract Political CSR scholars argue that multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) should be designed to facilitate deliberation among corporations, civil society groups, and others affected by corporate conduct for their decisions to be considered democratically legitimate. However, critics argue that decisions reached within deliberative MSIs will lack democratic legitimacy so long as corporations are granted a role in helping to make them. If the critics are correct, it leads to a paradox. Corporations must be excluded from holding decision-making authority within MSIs if they are to function as democratically legitimate regulatory institutions at a global level. However, this risks severely diminishing the incentive of corporations to support and participate within MSIs, which often depend heavily for their success on the visibility provided them by corporate participants. In this paper, I argue that this apparent paradox should be considered irrelevant to the future study of MSIs since it is both unnecessary and impractical for researchers to focus on establishing democratically legitimate systems of governance within them. Instead, I recommend an approach informed by three touchstones of pragmatic philosophy to guide their future study—a criterion of usefulness , wariness of category disputes and commitment to experimentalism . I conclude by drawing on research in political science and social psychology that demonstrates an important practical role for deliberation within such organizations, arguing that researchers must zero in on the role that inclusive deliberation can play in bolstering their effectiveness as regulatory instruments.