Multi-stakeholder participation (MSP) has become a central feature in several institutions and processes of global governance. Those who promote them trust that these arrangements can advance the deliberative quality of international institutions, and thereby improve the democratic quality, legitimacy and effectiveness of both the institutional landscape, as well as decisions made within it. This paper employs a heuristic framework to analyze the deliberative quality of MSP. Specifically, it applies Dryzek's deliberative systems framework to the case of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The assessment shows that the CFS improves the deliberative quality of food security governance by including and facilitating the transmission of discourses from the public to the empowered spaces. However, the deliberative quality of CFS could be higher with stronger accountability mechanisms in place, more meta-deliberation and adoption of CFS outcomes at national and local levels. Reflecting on the limitations of using this heuristic framework to assess MSP, we conclude that the analysis would benefit from more explicit consideration of different forms of power that are part of the social relations between actors involved in such settings. By proposing this analytical approach, we expect to advance a heuristic framework for assessing deliberation in an international context of the growing importance of MSP in sustainability and global governance.
This article compares the "land grab" activities of two major capital exporting countries, China and the United Kingdom. I argue that specifics such as the home country's industrial set-up, development challenges and ideological framing are critical to understanding what is occurring from an investor country perspective, while explanations based on differences between the countries' political-economic systems are overrated. For both countries, projects considered to be land grabs are part of a range of distinct, often conflicting project-level rationales. And these rationales fit equally as well within the liberal development paradigms of efficiency, productivity and growth as they do within the resource security paradigm prevalent in the land grab debate.RÉSUMÉ Cet article compare la dynamique de l'accaparement des terres dans deux pays qui sont de grands exportateurs de capitaux: la Chine et le Royaume-Uni. Il soutient que les explications de ce phénomène s'en tiennent trop souvent aux différences entre les systèmes politico-économiques des pays investisseurs, alors que ce sont plutôt leurs caractéristiques spécifiques sur le plan de la structure industrielle, du développement et des orientations idéologiques qui sont des facteurs cruciaux pour comprendre la situation du point de vue d'un pays investisseur. Dans les deux pays étudiés, les projets considérés comme de l'accaparement des terres relèvent de logiques distinctes, souvent contradictoires, au niveau des projets. Ces logiques trouvent leur place aussi bien dans un cadre libéral de développement axé sur l'efficacité, la productivité et la croissance que dans le cadre de la sécurisation des ressources qui prévaut dans le débat sur l'accaparement des terres.
Biofuels have been promoted worldwide under the assumption that they can support several strategic policy goals, while mitigating associated risks. Drawing on published evidence on performance, contributing papers to this Special Section question assumptions commonly attributed to biofuels: their carbon neutrality, their positive effect on rural livelihoods, and policymakers' ability to effectively govern for sustainability. This paper takes these findings as its starting point and asks, "What next?" for countries wishing to advance biofuels as one option for the necessary divestment from fossil fuels. Deriving recommendations for national biofuel programmes from past performance is no easy task. Context, complexity, power dynamics and scaling pose significant challenges to achieving policy aims. We are nevertheless able to distil a set of sine qua nons (indispensables) for sustainable biofuel governance from the evidence and change management literatures. They are put forward not as recipes for success, but minimum conditions and "best bet" approaches requiring testing, deliberation, and refinement. Perhaps the most fundamental sine qua non is to pursue options that downscale global demand-as current levels of global energy consumption, if only in the transport sector, cannot be met by biomass-derived agrofuels in a way that meets social and environmental sustainability goals.
In the face of multiple crises of ecology, economy, and social equity, the question of how to democratically transform toward a more sustainable society is high on the political agenda as well as pertinent to academic research. The first part of this introductory article to the special issue provides a brief overview of contemporary interrelated debates on sustainability, democracy, and transformation. It discusses the main concepts, themes, and questions that are part of the highly diverse and constantly evolving body of literature on the topic, as well as differences regarding analytical frames and normative underpinnings. The overview shows that the literature remains largely silent about supporting theories of change, ontologies, methodologies, and principles-and/or the ways in which transformation, sustainability, and democracy are interrelated. The second part of this article introduces the contributions to this special issue. The special issue is guided by three overarching questions: what can we say about the possibilities and problems of democratically enacting changes toward greater social, ecological, economic, and political sustainability in societies? Which analytic frames are useful for evaluating change, including its democratic and sustainability quality? Where do evaluations and judgments derive their analytical and normative legitimacy from? ARTICLE HISTORY
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