Patrick Keenan (University of Illinois College of Law) has posted Evidence-Based Stakeholder Engagement: The Promise of Randomized Control Trials for Business and Human Rights (Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
When a large-scale development project comes to a poor country, that project typically comes with a stakeholder engagement plan, which structures the relationship between those affected by the new project and the proponents of the project. The plan sorts those affected by the project into categories, distributes economic benefits differentially based on those categories, allocates other benefits which can increase or decrease the social power of those affected, defines the ways that people harmed by the project may seek redress for their injuries, and might even modify existing governance structures. In the past decade, through the efforts of large institutional lenders—such as the International Finance Corporation and an array of non-governmental organizations—stakeholder engagement plans have become more comprehensive and sensitive to the wide range of impacts that development projects can have on the communities in which those projects take place. Nonetheless, stakeholder engagement plans are problematic, in large part because they amount to a new legal system, plunked down in a community in which there already exists a formal legal system (in the form of national and municipal law), and the usual non-formal mechanisms of addressing legal or quasi-legal issues exist in every community.