A Strategic Approach to Multistakeholder Negotiations

By D. Edmunds, E. Wollenberg. 2001

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Environment and development practitioners increasingly are interested in identifying methods, institutional arrangements and policy environments that promote negotiations among natural resource stakeholders leading to collective action and, it is hoped, sustainable resource management. Yet the implications of negotiations for disadvantaged groups of people are seldom critically examined. We draw attention to such implications by examining different theoretical foundations for multistakeholder negotiations and linking these to practical problems for disadvantaged groups. We argue that negotiations based on an unhealthy combination of communicative rationality and liberal pluralism, which underplays or seeks to neutralize differences among stakeholders, poses considerable risks for disadvantaged groups. We suggest that negotiations influenced by radical pluralist and feminist poststructuralist thought, which emphasize strategic behaviour and selective alliance-building, promise better outcomes for disadvantaged groups in most cases, particularly on the scale and in the historical contexts in which negotiations over forest management usually take place.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7920ce23e1180f6dac3565ea79d1a9ea3a93ac0

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In Building and Construction

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Competing Claims on Natural Resources: What Role for Science? (2008, background): “Scientists thus need to actively and strategically engage with specific stakeholders in order to contribute to more sustainable resource use (Edmunds and Wollenberg 2001:232).”
Exploring equity and sustainable development in the new carbon economy (2003, background): “Edmunds and Wollenberg (2001)maintain that it is unreasonable to expect consensus and synergy when the ‘partners’ are so unmatched in terms of power and access to resources.”
Equity, Power Games, and Legitimacy: Dilemmas of Participatory Natural Resource Management (2013, background): “Key Words: critical systems; inequity; participatory approach; power; reflexivity; transdisciplinarity”
Troubles on the way: An analysis of the challenges faced by multi-stakeholder platforms (2006, background): “Edmunds and Wollenberg (2001) cite several examples of short-term MSPs, where there was no room for capacity building and where weaker groups were forced to accept agreements contrary to their interests.”
Connecting Diverse Knowledge Systems for Enhanced Ecosystem Governance: The Multiple Evidence Base Approach (2014, background): “The focus on obtaining consensus, which is often assumed to be a prerequisite for these kinds of forums, may lead to the false impression that all participants share the ‘‘experts’’ views (Edmunds and Wollenberg 2001; Voß and Bornemann 2011).”