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.
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