Dissent in Consensusland: An Agonistic Problematization of Multi-stakeholder Governance

Multi-stakeholder initiatives involve actors from several spheres of society (market, civil society and state) in collaborative arrangements to reach objectives typically related to sustainable development. In political CSR literature, these arrangements have been framed as improvements to transnational governance and as being somehow democratic. We draw on Mouffe’s works on agonistic pluralism to problematize the notion that consensus-led...