Revisiting Global Governance in Multistakeholder Initiatives: Club Governance Based on Ideational Prealignments

Multistakeholder initiatives that bring together actors from the state, the business sector and society to formulate, implement and/or monitor rules governing different policy fields have assumed a prominent role in global governance since the 1980s. In the governance literature, it is generally assumed that the actors from the three sectors have diverse interests, but contribute different resources. This should allow to address transnational problems more effectively. While cooperation among the various collective actors in these initiatives might be based in part on complementary resources, we argue here that such cooperation is also shaped and conditioned by ideational prealignments of the participating actors. Such ideational prealignments are consequential, because they predetermine (1) the composition of multistakeholder forums in terms of which actors participate and which do not, (2) the processes that govern these forums, (3) the results of these forums and (4) the relations among the collective actors who participate in these forums and the stakeholders they are deemed to represent. When viewed from this perspective, multistakeholder initiatives are a form of club governance that is based on ideational factors. We illustrate this argument by drawing on research that examines the setting of standards for private military and security companies (PMSCs)