Taking democracy to the next level? Global civil society participation in the shaping of the Sustainable Development Goals from Rio to New York (2012-2015)

Abstract

During the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations consulted worldwide nearly 10 million people for their views. Such proliferating megaconsultations are often uncritically accepted as a remedy for an assumed democratic deficit of intergovernmental policymaking. The research argues, however, that civil society consultations have fallen short of democratizing global governance for mainly three reasons. First, global civil society consultations have limited legitimacy. Whether they are conducted online or within global negotiating hubs, these consultations regularly fail to include actors from developing countries or beyond institutionalized civil society networks. Second, global civil society consultations have limited influence on intergovernmental policymaking and eventually fail to increase the responsiveness of global norms and institutions to collective preferences. The research reveals a democracy—influence paradox, whereby civil society is less likely to influence within formally-commissioned, far-reaching and inclusive consultations than within informal and elitist participatory spaces. Third, despite the proliferation of megaconsultations, discursive diversity in global policymaking remains low, with mainstream discourses being over-represented compared to transformative ones. Participatory exclusiveness eventually produces discursive exclusiveness, thus indicating the limits of discursive representation for global democratization. Despite their limitations, the research concludes that global consultations still provide an important impetus to democratization by building civil society actors' democratic skills. It advances a set of recommendations to guide the future action of practitioners in strengthening much needed global democratic safeguards, now that recent developments in world politics suggest it is fear, rather than cooperation, that dictates political behaviors in the global system.