Abstract
This chapter critically examines the democratic potential of global public-private partnerships (PPPs) promoting sustainable development and combating climate change. Since the 1990s the multi-stakeholder partnership model has gained ground in environmental, health, and development governance as a complement to intergovernmental environmental agreements. “‘Partnerships’ as a term is rapidly becoming the new mantra shaping the UN discourse on global politics” (Martens, 2007: 4). Multilateral institutions are increasingly outsourcing governance functions to PPPs. Global environmental governance experiments with what has been branded “new” modes of horizontal governance involving multi-stakeholder deliberation between government, market, and civil society actors, where PPPs can be seen as a prime example. These novel forms of public-private collaboration in environmental politics are associated with the “deliberative turn” and a revitalized interest in deliberative democracy (Bäckstrand et al., 2010). Global environmental PPPs are frequently advanced as innovations that can potentially reduce the three deficits of global governance, namely the implementation, governance, and legitimacy deficits (Haas, 2004).
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© 2010 Karin Bäckstrand
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Bäckstrand, K. (2010). From Rhetoric to Practice: The Legitimacy of Global Public-Private Partnerships for Sustainable Development. In: Bexell, M., Mörth, U. (eds) Democracy and Public-Private Partnerships in Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283237_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283237_8
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