Multi-stakeholder Deliberation for (Global) Justice: An Approach from Modern Civic Republicanism

This chapter presents the minimal and common conditions for multistakeholder deliberation for (global) justice from the perspective of ‘modern civic republicanism’. I derive this model by drawing on some aspects from the work on intercultural justice in Nathan (2010).1 One reason for considering an approach from modern civic republicanism is that the Western liberal democratic societies embrace a liberal tradition of freedom as non-interference on governance, which is problematic on the need for government intervention for justice. We have recently witnessed many financial crises that have called for government intervention in the form of bailouts and austerity measures which found little support among the population (e.g. austerity measures to tackle the debt crisis in Greece, and the proposal by the Cyprus government for a levy on bank deposits). I intend to show that modern civic republicanism promotes freedom as non-domination, which may allow for non-arbitrary interference through deliberation for justice. Moreover, I shall show that some aspects of classical liberalism, such as state neutrality and the public versus private dichotomy, are challenges to deliberation by stakeholders from both the private and public sector for public interest within a transnational and global context. We face transnational governance gaps on global issues and crises such as poverty, climate change, financial collapse and many others which require multi-stakeholder deliberation for global justice, from both the public and private spheres, within the context of transition from the Westphalian state-centric international order to a post-Westphalian transnational order in which many actors other than states, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international organisations (e.g. World Trade Organization (WTO), International Labour Organization (ILO)) as well as multinational and transnational corporations (TNCs), are becoming significant actors (Nye and Keohane, 1971; Scherer and Smid, 2000; Kobrin, 2008, 2009).