Multistakeholder Governance

Comment by Michel Bauwens

In my provisional understanding, the pure forms of peer governance apply peer production communities, and the different forms of self-organizing communities in distributed networks.

But in decentralized systems with competing centers of power, we have to look into multistakeholder forms of governance, to enrich and ameliorate the current forms of representational democracy.

The stakeholder concept in Business

From the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_view

"The stakeholder concept states that a company's responsibilities are to all of its stakeholders. Stakeholders are people who affect, and are affected by, the company. This means that a business has to fulfill the needs and wants of many different people ranging from the local population and customers to their own employees and owners. While this has an increased cost, many firms are now switching to this concept because it is perceived that the concept improves the image of a firm and makes them less likely to be targeted by pressure groups. The opposite of this is the shareholder concept.

The stakeholder view of strategy is an instrumental theory of the corporation, integrating both the resource-based view as well as the market-based view, and adding a socio-political level. It is opposed to the view where a company solely tries to increase value for the shareholders.

According to the stakeholder view, the focal firm can be defined as follows: "The corporation is an organization engaged in mobilizing resources for productive uses in order to create wealth and other benefits (and not to intentionally destroy wealth, increase risk, or cause harm) for its multiple constituents, or stakeholders." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_view)