Articulating Sustainable Development: Multi-Stakeholder Dialogues & The Creation of Global Environmental Discourse.

The argument has been made that environmental movement organization should concentrate more effort toward affecting political discourse related to the environment (Burns and LeMoyne 2001). In this article, we revisit this argument and provide empirical evidence regarding the importance of social movement participation in global discursive processes. Through utilization of NUD^*IST 4 and NVivo software packages, we analyze transcripts of the first annual U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue on industry and sustainable development. The analysis illustrates that non-state actors, including social movement organizations, play a critical role in the articulation and extension of world models related to the achievement of sustainable development. Although the actors do not always agree on all dimensions of the models under negotiation, they draw upon a foundation of commonly accepted definitions and goals. In so doing they facilitate the expansion of models by addressing the concerns of various participating actors. The results of our examination illustrate that multi-stakeholder processes within global institutions can promote the negotiation of universally accepted solutions to the challenges surrounding sustainable development. Because processes like the UNCSD dialogues include governments, the global discursive communities that result from such dialogues can directly impact nation-state behavior as well as the direction of policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]