Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs)—private governance mechanisms involving firms, civil society organizations, and other actors deliberating to set rules, such as standards or codes of conduct, with which firms comply voluntarily—have become important tools for governing global business activities and the social and environmental consequences of these activities. Yet, this growth is paralleled with concerns about MSIs’ deliberative capacity, including the limited inclusion of some marginalized stakeholders, bias toward corporate interests, and, ultimately, ineffectiveness in their role as regulators. In this article, we conceptualize MSIs as deliberative systems to open the black box of the different elements that make up the MSI polity and better understand how their deliberative capacity hinges on problems in different elements. On the basis of this conceptualization, we examine how deliberative mini-publics—forums in which a randomly selected group of individuals from a particular population engage in learning and facilitated deliberations about a topic—can improve the deliberative capacity of MSIs.

多方利益相关者倡议 (MSIs)——涉及企业、民间社会组织和其他参与者的私人治理机制，这些参与者商议制定企业自愿遵守的规则，例如标准或行为准则——已经成为治理全球商业活动的重要工具，这些活动的社会和环境后果。然而，这种增长伴随着对 MSI 审议能力的担忧，包括一些边缘化利益相关者的有限参与、对公司利益的偏见，以及最终他们作为监管者的角色的低效。在本文中，我们将 MSI 概念化为协商系统，以打开构成 MSI 政体的不同元素的黑匣子，并更好地理解它们的协商能力如何取决于不同元素中的问题。