Worldwide we see the rise of new non-state, ?multi-stakeholder? organizations setting standards for socially and environmentally responsible practices. A multi-stakeholder organization builds on the idea of assembling actors from diverse societal spheres into one rule-setting process, thereby combining their resources, competences, and experiences. These processes also allow competing interests to negotiate and deliberate about their different concerns in global political and ethical matters. This paper analyzes multi-stakeholder dynamics within three global standard setters: the Forest Stewardship Council, the Marine Stewardship Council, (...) and the work of the International Organization for Standardization on social responsibility (ISO 26000). Although the multi-stakeholder organizational form facilitates the establishment of transnational non-state authority, this very structure could also result in fragility. The key aim of this paper is to elaborate on this fragility with specific focus on how participatory aspects within a multi-stakeholder context both contribute to and destabilize the authority of the multi-stakeholder organization. The paper contributes theoretically to current discussions about transnational governance in the making, and more specifically it adds nuance to the discussion about the fragility of non-state authority as well as a critical perspective to the literature on multi-stakeholder arrangements. (shrink)

Thirty years ago the American philosopher Holmes Rolston published a seminal article in Ethics announcing the birth of a new sub‐discipline in philosophy: environmental ethics. However, while environmental ethicists focused on meta‐ethical questions, the public needed answers to many political questions and dilemmas. This gave rise to some fascinating works in environmental political theory. This essay analyses their achievement – what has been solved and what still remains to be studied – focusing on three main topics: justice and the environment, (...) democracy and the environment, and globalism and the environment. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Political respect for nature is an important part of cultivating a more emancipatory and ecologically sustainable politics. As a political principle, it can supplement respect for persons with institutional mechanisms that formally constrain how human power may be exercised over non-human beings and things and that require us to use our power in ways that are attentive to nature’s well-being along with our own. Moreover, when internalized by citizens as part of their shared political ethos and public culture, respect for (...) nature has the potential to protect against the abuse of power in our interpersonal relations with Earth’s non-human parts. Political respect for nature means acknowledging that non-human beings and things count, that they deserve to be treated according to standards of right and that there are principled limits to how human power may be exercised over them. It means formalizing these constraints in the basic structure of society and fostering a public culture of self-restraint and responsiveness. (shrink)