A strategic approach to multistakeholder negotiations

Environment and development practitioners increasingly are interested in id entifying methods, institutional arrangements and policy environments that promote negotiations among natural resource stakeholders leading to collect ive action and, it is hoped, sustainable resource management. Yet the impli cations of negotiations for disadvantaged groups of people are seldom criti cally examined. We draw attention to such implications by examining differe nt theoretical foundations for multistakeholder negotiations and linking th ese to practical problems for disadvantaged groups. We argue that negotiati ons based on an unhealthy combination of communicative rationality and libe ral pluralism, which underplays or seeks to neutralize differences among st akeholders, poses considerable risks for disadvantaged groups. We suggest t hat negotiations influenced by radical pluralist and feminist poststructura list thought, which emphasize strategic behaviour and selective alliance-bu ilding, promise better outcomes for disadvantaged groups in most cases, par ticularly on the scale and in the historical contexts in which negotiations over forest management usually take place.