Building on John Gerard Ruggie’s pioneering study of multilateralism, this paper presents an analogous study of multi-stakeholder governance and argues that multi-stakeholderism is, as yet, a much less well-defined institutional form, with cases exhibiting significant variation both in the combinations of actor classes entitled to participate and the nature of authority relations among those actors. The authors propose a taxonomy of the types of multi-stakeholderism and apply it to five illustrative cases. They conclude by examining their argument’s implications and identify areas for further research.
