Resumen

This chapter deals with what the scholarly and grey literature describes as multi-stakeholder forums, platforms, processes, partnerships, and networks. These initiatives are purposely organized interactive processes that bring together a range of stakeholders to participate in dialogue, decision-making or implementation, or all three, regarding actions to address a common problem, or to achieve a common goal. Multi-stakeholder mechanisms have been proposed, funded, and put into action with much optimism as a more democratic and equitable alternative to business-as-usual approaches to decision-making, which are commonly top-down, unisectoral, and expert driven. Thus, multi-stakeholder processes are potentially a more equitable and effective approach to dealing with the complex and, following this volume’s title, wicked problems that arise in decision-making around forestry and land use. Yet, like other participatory decision-making mechanisms, multi-stakeholder processes have also fallen under much criticism from a wide range of positions, from scholars to grassroots activists. These critics argue that these processes do little to address power inequalities among their participants, and thus commonly only serve to maintain the status quo