Decontesting Corporate Responsibility for Collaboration: A Case Study of a Cross-Sector Coalition Lobbying for Human Rights Regulation

Abstract

This article examines how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and firms can collaborate on a contested corporate social responsibility (CSR) issue in lobbying the government to regulate businesses. Previous research has established how various contextual, organizational, and interactional factors affect cross-sector collaboration. However, there is little research on specific strategies that organizations can use to collaborate on contested and divisive issues. While research on CSR has introduced decontestation as a way of establishing dominant interpretations or depoliticization of CSR, through an empirical study, we suggest that decontestation can be used as a means of constituting cross-sector collaboration around contested issues and as a strategy for lobbying politicians and the public. We identified different mechanisms of decontestation employed by a Finnish cross-sector coalition in lobbying for human rights due diligence regulation. Our findings expand the literature on CSR decontestation and contribute to a better understanding of how NGOs and firms can form and collaborate in a cross-sector coalition to advance a contested issue.

A variety of business-society issues, such as the protection of human rights and the environment in value chains, attract debate, as both the aims and means to address them are often contested. While voluntary measures to control corporate conduct have proliferated, governments remain key players in providing regulatory solutions to issues concerning corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business and human rights (BHR). However, urging governments to act is not straightforward when the issues are not high on the political agenda or when they divide different actors, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, and political parties. Consequently, one way of pushing such regulation forward is to build cross-sector support from businesses and other organizations to show that there is a broader societal interest in finding a regulatory solution to a given problem. Recently, cooperation between corporations and NGOs advocating jointly for government regulation on BHR issues has emerged, such as the Finnish coalition #Ykkösketjuun and the Dutch coalition Initiative for Sustainable and Responsible Business Conduct.

However, building cross-sector support for an issue can be difficult when the organizational interests of NGOs and businesses diverge (Selsky & Parker, 2005). Many CSR issues tend to be contested among different stakeholders (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2021; Levy et al., 2016; Moisander et al., 2024). For example, Whelan et al. (2009, p. 378) argued that NGOs and firms often find it challenging to reach a consensus on BHR issues, as they “are commonly driven by divergent interests and [. . .] tend to be informed by different ideational factors.” In particular, creating consensus around regulatory solutions can be challenging because businesses and NGOs often have very different views of what the regulation should look like. In France, for example, the legislative process, which culminated in the passing of human rights due diligence legislation (Journal Officielle de la République Française, 2017), was characterized by contestation between businesses and NGOs (Evans, 2020). Overcoming sectoral differences in how corporate responsibility is seen thus becomes crucial for cross-sector collaboration for lobbying regulation.

Previous research has shown how the emergence of cross-sector movements may depend on factors such as prior relationships, common interests, shared ideologies, and the presence of political opportunities and threats (Brooker & Meyer, 2019; McCammon & Moon, 2015; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009). The accommodation of diverging interests can be seen as the result of negotiation, in which a substantive agreement is reached, for example, in the form of a compromise regarding the purpose of the collaboration (Cloutier & Langley, 2017; Eden & Huxham, 2001), although the participants may maintain different motivations for the collaboration (Klitsie et al., 2018). However, there are few insights into the kind of strategies that can be used to reach an agreement on contested regulatory issues that might cause debilitating haggling and prevent coalition formation.

As one way of addressing the divergent meanings attached to issues of corporate responsibility, the literature has proposed the notion of “decontestation” of CSR in at least two different ways. Feix and Philippe (2020) referred to decontestation as a signification process that fixates the meaning of CSR in a particular way, neutralizing dissent and pre-empting contestation over it. They argued that such decontestation has resulted in a corporate interpretation of CSR becoming dominant, leaving little possibility for articulating alternative interpretations. Meanwhile, van den Broek (2024) showed how political actors can neutralize the meaning of CSR, or “de-contest” it, by redefining it in a technocratic manner as something measurable through objective, apolitical indicators, thus avoiding contestation. Both accounts of decontestation have a hegemonic outcome, in which one party prevails over the signification of CSR without accommodating the interpretations of other actors. Such processes show how the contestation of CSR can be avoided; however, they seem hardly suitable for collaboration, where different actors must overcome their differing takes on an issue. Observing a contested regulatory issue in the Finnish context drew our attention to a form of decontestation that seemed to avoid both the imposition of meaning and the depoliticization of CSR. This led us to ask the research question: How can decontestation be mobilized in the context of cross-sector collaborations on contested CSR issues?

Through a longitudinal case study of a Finnish cross-sector collaboration of NGOs and business firms that advocated for human rights due diligence (HRDD) ¹ legislation, we offer empirical evidence to suggest processes by which CSR can be decontested in different ways for cross-sector collaboration and action. We show how decontestation was used both during the formation of the cross-sector coalition and its subsequent advocacy. During the formative stage, decontestation was deployed by bracketing out, for a specified period of time, some of the contested aspects of the issue so that the participants could find a common purpose for their collaboration. During the subsequent advocacy work, decontestation was used as an outward-oriented strategy in presenting the issue to politicians in an inclusive way, preventing it from being captured by partisan politics, and in gathering public support through a non-threatening and diversified public communication strategy that avoided overt debate and stigmatization of the issue.

Our findings allow us to make two contributions. First, in relation to the budding literature on CSR decontestation, we provide a more nuanced view of decontestation as a relational process involving different mechanisms that do not necessarily lead to hegemony over the issue (Feix & Philippe, 2020) or depoliticization (van den Broek, 2024). Second, in relation to the literature on the formation of cross-sector collaborations, we suggest that successful cross-sector coalition building may not only depend on participants’ willingness to commit to a compromise on a contested issue but also on an “agreement to disagree”—that is, on decontesting a contested issue by bracketing contentious elements from current deliberation and postponing the disagreement to a later time. In these ways, decontestation can be a positive strategy for cross-sector collaboration on contested issues, at least in the context of atypical collaborations that aim at lobbying the government to solve the problem rather than developing a solution themselves.

The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. First, we review the literature on cross-sector collaboration, CSR decontestation, and lobbying strategies. We then explain the methods for our case study of the Finnish #Ykkösketjuun campaign coalition. Through our analysis, we show how decontestation played a crucial role both in the formation of the coalition and in its subsequent successful advocacy. Based on our analysis, we propose a model to explain cross-sector coalition formation and lobbying premised on decontestation. Finally, we discuss our contributions.

Cross-Sector Collaboration and Decontestation of CSR

Solving Contested CSR and BHR Issues

Cross-sector collaborations and partnerships between businesses and NGOs can be important for alleviating a variety of environmental and social issues (Crane & Clarke, 2018; Dentoni et al., 2018; Jamali & Keshishian, 2009; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009; Selsky & Parker, 2005; Stadtler et al., 2024). While they may provide solutions to some problems and help businesses to “do good” voluntarily (e.g., in the form of certifications and standards), it often falls on governments to ensure that businesses “do no harm” through legislation. Recent BHR literature has pointed out how compliance with regulation has become a somewhat neglected topic in CSR research (Schrempf-Stirling et al., 2022), and indeed, little attention has been given to how cross-sector collaborations relate to regulatory initiatives on CSR. BHR research has also emphasized the need to better understand processes that lead to human rights norms (Schrempf-Stirling & Van Buren, 2024); regulatory initiatives may be counted among them. These critical notions can inform CSR research to better appreciate the central role of governments in addressing business-society issues.

Yet, it is not self-evident that a government would take up the task of considering and passing regulations on a business-society issue. Legislators might consider, for example, how new regulation burdens the competitiveness of businesses, or they might risk alienating their constituents with such projects. In these circumstances, organizations from different sectors might consider a form of cross-sector collaboration where the aim is to act as a catalyst and lobby the government to begin a regulatory process rather than seeking a solution to the issue themselves. Stadtler and Karakulak (2022) argued that when studying cross-sector collaborations, it is important to consider what their intended “output” is because different outputs entail different challenges and ways of organizing. When the output concerns regulation, interests and ideational factors typically clash. Regulation has winners and losers, and the prospect of winning or losing may exacerbate the contestation of the issue. Thus, the focal challenge is to explain how organizations from different sectors can forge an agreement and operate around a contested regulatory issue.

Cross-Sector Coalition Formation and Operation Around a Contested Issue

Previous literature on coalitions and partnerships has emphasized organizational, contextual, and interactional factors that explain their emergence and operation. In political contexts, coalitions are often defined as “temporary, means-oriented alliances among individuals or groups which differ in goals” aimed at influencing decision-making (Gamson, 1961, p. 374). Coalitions vary in type, duration, location, and form, and while they can pose risks, they also provide benefits for the involved organizations. For instance, joining a coalition may help an organization gain wider support for a promoted issue, but it could also threaten its integrity (Brooker & Meyer, 2019). Organizational factors, such as shared ideologies, similar motivations, previous social ties, and complementary resources, can provide a foundation for coalition formation; however, these coalitions may also be influenced by the political threats and opportunities within the societal context (Brooker & Meyer, 2019; McCammon & Moon, 2015; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009; van Dyke & Amos, 2017). Thus, the formation and stability of cross-sector coalitions are likely influenced by the characteristics of the participating organizations, their relationships, and the political environment.

Given our focus on contested issues, interactional factors are crucial for understanding how organizations can reconcile differences in their interests and ideational orientations. Cloutier and Langley (2017) argued that many difficulties in cross-sector collaborations arise from moral and ideological disagreements around the purpose of the collaboration and that such disagreements are anchored in the identities of the participants. As NGOs and firms typically differ in their beliefs and identities and they often have adversarial relations (Brand et al., 2020; den Hond & de Bakker, 2007), overcoming sectoral conflicts is a central issue in cross-sector coalition formation. A key step in creating a coalition is reaching an agreement on the ultimate purpose of the collaboration. Eden and Huxham (2001) noted that negotiating this purpose can be complicated and usually involves multiple phases before consensus is achieved.

In more traditional cross-sector collaborations, Klitsie et al. (2018) employed the framing theory to show that cross-sector collaborations around contested issues need not be unanimous when the frame plurality (i.e., how different actors perceive the issue) can be managed productively. However, forming a coalition around a regulatory initiative can be particularly challenging, as participants may become bogged down in the minutiae of regulation, which can undermine coalition formation. Therefore, the specific strategies through which organizations reach agreement in such contexts remain underexplored.

Another challenge that cross-sector collaborations face in the context of regulatory initiatives is how to promote and lobby for the issue. Cross-sector collaborations can be difficult to sustain, especially if the framing of the issue that an organization initially supported is lost during the collaboration (Klitsie et al., 2018). Hence, if a participating organization perceives that the promoted issue is being framed in a way that is too different—such as through overly radical lobbying—there is a risk of recontestation, which could terminate the collaboration.

Therefore, the strategies used by cross-sector collaborations are also relevant to better understand how the contestation around an issue is managed. Research on interest group lobbying distinguishes between public or outside strategies and private or inside strategies (Colli & Adriaensen, 2020; Dellmuth & Tallberg, 2017). This distinction has been established to differentiate the venues through which a cause is promoted: inside strategies involve targeting audiences directly through personal relations and contacts, while outside strategies build public pressure on these audiences with the help of voters and consumers. Inside and outside strategies are not mutually exclusive; NGOs can combine both, depending on their goals and access to policymakers (Colli & Adriaensen, 2020).

While previous literature on coalitions highlights the importance of context, organizational factors, and interactions between different actors, there is no clear explanation regarding the specific strategies relevant for forming and operating cross-sector coalitions around contested regulatory issues. Our observation of such an issue in the Finnish context led us to focus on how CSR might be decontested, which we explore next through the lens of existing research insights.

Decontesting CSR

Previous literature has identified two primary ways through which contestation around CSR can be quelled. These approaches are distinguished by the practices used to achieve decontestation: one focuses on how meaning is imposed on audiences through the selective use of narratives, while the other connects decontestation to depoliticization, aiming to remove CSR from the political sphere by reframing it as a technocratic exercise.

First, although the concept of decontestation is not always explicitly used, various forms of discursive actions related to CSR amounting to decontestation have been explored critically in contexts such as education (García-Rosell, 2019), child labor in supply chains (Boje & Khan, 2009) and the environmental sustainability of extractive industries (Bridge & McManus, 2000). This research emphasizes the hegemony of certain actors in shaping the meaning of CSR. Feix and Philippe (2020) built on these insights at the institutional level by explicitly discussing narratives that “revolve around CSR as such, above and beyond specific organizational or industry settings” (p. 136, original emphasis). They drew on Freeden’s (2005, 2008) theorization of the functioning of ideologies. Freeden (2005, p. 113) argued that ideologies fixate the meaning of political concepts when they “inject an aura of determinacy into political language through decontesting the essentially contestable—in other words, through linking together particular interpretations of each constituent concept that have been selected and prioritised out of an indeterminate range of meanings they may signify.” Drawing on this, Feix and Philippe (2020) posited that the legitimacy of CSR as an institution hinges on the decontestation of its contested nature, often through institutional narratives aimed not only at those directly involved in CSR but also at broader audiences, such as customers and the general public. These narratives serve to defuse critical arguments against CSR. They further contended that these narratives are maintained primarily by the corporate world and called for “recontesting” the meaning of CSR as the decontested, corporate-driven CSR narratives tend to downplay alternative, more societally beneficial ways of understanding corporate responsibility.

Second, van den Broek’s (2024, p. 615) analysis of CSR decontestation is closely related to depoliticization. She demonstrated how, in interactions between political actors and corporations, the meaning of CSR can be decontested by making “it appear ‘apolitical’ and ‘neutral’” through the establishment of objective measures for CSR. Depoliticization is generally understood as a demotion of issues for decision-making from the realm of political scrutiny and accountability, relegating them to the domain of technical necessity (Fawcett et al., 2017). Hence, the focus is not so much on imposing a particular meaning of CSR to attain legitimacy and defuse criticism but on establishing CSR as a technical issue that is beyond political and ethical debate.

These critical notions are crucial for understanding how actors can suppress alternative views on corporate responsibility. The result of such processes is the absence of contestation, which can be relevant for building agreements between different actors. However, these mechanisms may be less suited to collaborations in which participants join voluntarily.

In summary, we argue that cross-sector collaborations can be an important source for regulatory initiatives concerning CSR and BHR. Yet, forming such collaborations around contested issues can be challenging. While organizational and contextual factors can create opportunities for collaboration, they do not explain fully the strategies organizations can use to build coalitions and take action without falling into debilitating contestation. A potential way to overcome such challenges is decontestation, but existing research has largely focused on it as a tool for dominating CSR discourse. Based on this, we ask: How can decontestation be mobilized in the context of cross-sector collaborations on contested CSR issues?

Methods

The Finnish #Ykkösketjuun campaign coalition provided an opportunity for a longitudinal single case study (Yin, 2014) from a “developmental” process perspective (Langley & Tsoukas, 2017, p. 9). We deemed a single-case study appropriate for analyzing in-depth the processes of constituting and operating a cross-sector coalition around a contested issue, as it enabled us to zoom in on the strategies used by the actors involved. The case was particularly suited to our purposes due to the following characteristics: (a) the coalition’s goal pertained to a contemporary topic of corporate responsibility regulation that has sparked contestation (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2021); (b) the coalition included a significant number of NGOs, unions and corporations; and (c) the coalition explicitly aimed to influence political decision-making. Based on these characteristics, we argue that the case qualifies as a “critical case” (Yin, 2014, p. 51), which allows us to “confirm, challenge or extend” theory on decontestation in cross-sector collaboration. We first present a short historical background and synopsis of the case to situate our study in its context. We then discuss our data and analysis methods.

Case Background and Description

The cross-sector campaign coalition #Ykkösketjuun for HRDD legislation has its origins in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs; United Nations, 2011). Endorsed by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2011, the UNGPs set a global standard for advancing human rights in the context of business activities. A core element in the UNGPs is the concept of HRDD, which involves “assessing actual and potential human rights impacts, integrating and acting upon the findings, tracking responses, and communicating how impacts are addressed” (United Nations, 2011). HRDD is particularly emphasized in business supply chains, extending corporate responsibility to respect human rights well beyond organizational boundaries.

The UNGPs were to be substantiated at the national level in the European Union following the European Commission’s CSR strategy (European Commission, 2011). This CSR strategy encouraged European Union member states to develop national action plans (NAPs) for the implementation of the UNGPs. Based on the Finnish NAP, developed from 2014 to 2015, the Finnish government organized “roundtable” discussions with NGOs and corporations to explore how HRDD could be implemented on a voluntary basis in Finland. One of these roundtables focused on Finnish retail companies, and its participants produced a white paper on how to apply the UNGPs on a voluntary basis. Several of the NGOs and corporations that later joined the #Ykkösketjuun campaign coalition, including Finnwatch—a leading Finnish corporate responsibility watchdog—and the two largest retail companies in Finland, Kesko and S-Group, participated in drafting this white paper.

NGOs and labor unions began addressing the HRDD issue early on by providing feedback on a draft version of the Finnish NAP in 2014. In their comments, they emphasized the need for binding legislation rather than voluntary measures. By 2015, while several NGOs considered advocating for HRDD, they concluded that the political climate in Finland was not conducive to lobbying for such legislation. However, the adoption of France’s “corporate duty of vigilance” law in 2017 (Journal Officielle de la République Française, 2017) marked a turning point. This development demonstrated that passing HRDD legislation was achievable in Europe, reinvigorating the NGOs interest in pursuing similar efforts in Finland.

Corporate involvement with the UNGPs had primarily occurred through the aforementioned roundtable discussions. Around the same time, high-profile instances of human rights abuses in supply chains prompted some corporations to reevaluate their practices. For example, in 2013, Finnwatch produced a report highlighting labor abuses in the supply chains of Finnish retailers. This report implicated suppliers of major Finnish retailers Kesko and S-group, compelling these companies to address the issue publicly. What initially appeared to be an adversarial engagement later evolved into a long-term relationship between the watchdog organization and the two leading Finnish retailers.

In summary, the political-discursive context in the mid-2010s included high-profile attention to HRDD both internationally and nationally. There was also growing corporate awareness and recognition of labor abuses in international supply chains and their potential to damage corporate reputations. This environment offered fertile ground for NGOs to advance HRDD regulation in Finland.

The concept and timing of the campaign were tailored to the Finnish political system and its election cycles. Finland’s tradition of multi-party coalition governments entails that, after parliamentary elections, several political parties constituting a majority of the parliamentary seats negotiate a governmental program outlining policy plans for the new government. This program is difficult to amend once established, making lobbying for new legislation during a government’s term less effective (Vesa et al., 2018). Therefore, the most opportune time to advocate for new legislation is during the development of the governmental program for an incoming administration. Recognizing this, the idea for the #Ykkösketjuun campaign was conceived in late 2017, well in advance of the 2019 parliamentary elections.

In late 2017, the coalition started as a group of 17 NGOs. Over time, the group successfully convinced several corporations and other organizations to join their efforts in lobbying for HRDD regulation, thereby forming a cross-sector coalition. The core coalition comprised 52 organizations, including 17 firms, and was supported by 92 additional organizations that lent their logos and names for public campaigning. Of the total 144 organizations involved, 70 were firms. Throughout its operation, the coalition lobbied both politicians and the general public. In the end, the coalition achieved its goal, as a statement on HRDD regulation was included in the 2019 governmental program.

Research Materials

Our analysis draws on both elicited and naturally occurring data from multiple sources, covering the periods before, during, and after the campaign. Table 1 provides an overview of the research materials used in this study.

Table 1.

Research Materials.

Data type	Data amount	Purpose of the data
Interviews (All)	33	Understanding how the coalition was organized (formation and coalition strategies)
NGO	12
Firm	15
Labor unions	4
Civil servants	2
Campaign internal materials	92	Understanding how the coalition was organized (formation and coalition strategies), triangulating interview data. Includes, for example, meeting minutes, communication and lobbying plans and materials, interim reports
External documents (All)	90
NGO	54	Understanding the background of the campaign; examining coalition outside strategies
Firm	19
Government	10
Media	7
Other: panel discussion recordings (3), podcasts (3), Tweets	6+ Tweet data	Examining coalition outside strategies
Meeting observations	3	Examining the process continuation after the coalition exit

Note. NGO = non-governmental organizations.

The primary data comprise 31 semi-structured interviews with representatives from participating organizations and 2 additional interviews with civil servants. All interviews were conducted after the campaign had ended. Among these, 12 interviews were conducted with NGO representatives (with 2 individuals from 1 NGO interviewed separately), 15 with representatives from various firms, and 4 with labor union representatives. NGO and union representatives were topic specialists, apart from one executive director. Firm representatives were either specialist managers for CSR, sustainability, and/or communication or founders of their companies. We selected the interviewees from the most active organizations in the campaign based on internal materials and recommendations from other interviewees.

The interviews were conducted in either English or Finnish, with an average duration of 47 min, ranging from 24 to 70 min. The interviews covered topics such as the history of the organizations’ involvement with HRDD and CSR in general, their relationships with NGOs and businesses, their motivations for joining the coalition, and their lobbying strategies. We also interviewed two civil servants to better understand the history of HRDD in Finland and the regulatory review process. With the consent of the respondents, all interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis.

Given the retrospective nature of the interviews, we supplemented the dataset with archival materials to better capture the dynamic processes of coalition formation and action as they happened. Among the most significant archival materials were internal documents stored on the online platform used by the campaign organization for internal communication, to which we were kindly granted access. These materials allowed us to triangulate the interview data. Additionally, we collected media texts, governmental reports, and publications from the involved organizations on the topic, covering the periods before, during, and after the campaign. These materials were identified through systematic searches for HRDD-related content and campaign-related materials on the organizations’ websites. The interviews and campaign platform also led us to discover other relevant materials (e.g., a podcast). This diverse dataset provided valuable insights into the context in which the coalition was formed and included records of the coalition’s public communications during the campaign. Altogether, we collected 182 documents, 6 audio-visual recordings, and 3,305 tweets featuring the campaign’s hashtag. The documents included meeting minutes, planning presentations, and activity logs. The tweets were analyzed to evaluate the coalition’s visibility and impact on social media.

Finally, the first author participated in several joint meetings held after the campaign had ended, during which several core participants followed up on developments related to the legislative initiative. His notes served as research material for examining how the campaign was terminated.

Data Analysis

Our analysis followed three key steps. First, we familiarized ourselves with the background of HRDD in Finland. We reviewed governmental reports, NGO commentaries on the NAP and corporate reports to understand the development of discussions on HRDD prior to the formation of the cross-sector coalition. Additionally, we asked our interlocutors about their organizations’ perspectives on HRDD before joining the coalition. Based on these materials, we wrote a historical synopsis of HRDD development in Finland, which served as a starting point for analyzing how the coalition came into being. The above case description is based on this synopsis.

Second, we focused on the coalition itself and constructed a time-ordered display (Miles & Huberman, 1994) detailing who did what and when. This display was then visualized in a simplified timeline (Figure 1). Since the interviews were conducted after the events had taken place, the timeline was primarily based on materials from the platform’s archive. Although the timeline itself is not complex, it allowed us to closely examine the sequence of events using a temporal bracketing strategy (Langley, 1999). This approach enabled us to identify who initiated the coalition-building process, how the coalition expanded, and how it operated. We distinguished two partly overlapping phases of coalition formation and coalition action, as well as a third post-coalition phase, which we employed as temporal brackets for the analysis.

Figure 1.

Case Timeline.

Third, we developed our understanding of how the coalition organized itself, conducted advocacy with politicians, and executed public media campaigns. Our units of analysis were the strategic decisions made during cross-sector coalition formation and lobbying efforts, enabling us to consider how the focal issue was managed. We identified patterns (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 69) in how the core coalition members effectively prevented internal and external contestation around the issue. Using pattern coding, we categorized recurring decisions and actions from the interviews and archival data that pertained to coalition formation and action. For coalition formation, our coding was entirely inductive, whereas, for the coalition’s action strategies, we applied the distinction between inside and outside strategies (Colli & Adriaensen, 2020) as an additional analytical lens. After identifying strategic moves related to coalition formation and lobbying activities, we interpreted and theorized these as mechanisms of decontestation. We used interview data to capture the interviewees’ perspectives on the process and cross-referenced these accounts with archival data to verify that the events they described had indeed occurred. For example, when an interviewee mentioned efforts to meet politicians from various parties, we examined the archival data to confirm which meetings had taken place.

To contextualize these mechanisms of decontestation, we revisited the case background to examine the factors that enabled them, coding for relevant contextual elements. This coding was partially informed by previous literature on coalition formation, focusing on interests, previous interactions, and the political environment (Brooker & Meyer, 2019; McCammon & Moon, 2015), which we linked to the decontestation of the focal issue. Through this process, we identified contextual factors relevant to decontestation in coalition formation and coalition action. We also related the different mechanisms to observable outcomes, such as the coalition’s growth and the consequences of its lobbying activities.

We recognize the inherent risk of attributing excessive foresight and agency to the focal agents, resulting from the researcher’s interpretation or post hoc rationalizations by interviewees. We sought to mitigate this risk in several ways. First, we relied on archival data in addition to interviews. Archival data were produced during the process and are, therefore, immune to post hoc rationalizations. Second, we approached the various agents symmetrically, avoiding the elevation of any single actor above others by collecting data from multiple organizations involved in the coalition. Finally, by analyzing how coalition formation and lobbying were influenced by organizational and contextual factors that facilitated decontestation, we sought to establish boundary conditions for its applicability.

The quotes included in the analysis section were chosen for their ability to illustrate the strategic processes we identified. Panels A to D in Appendix A present the data structure along with additional examples. The first two panels outline the antecedents for decontestation in coalition formation and coalition action, while the latter two describe the mechanisms of decontestation during coalition formation and inside and outside lobbying. The interview quotes are attributed to corporations (CORPx), non-governmental organizations (NGOx), labor unions (UNIx) and civil servants (CSx). Quotations from documents are marked with the document’s name. The first author translated interviews conducted in Finnish into English.

Findings: Decontestation of CSR for Coalition Formation and Coalition Action

Enabling Factors

Based on our analysis, we identified four enabling factors relevant to the decontestation of the issue: the acceptable risk/benefit ratio of cross-sector collaboration for participants, the interests of participating organizations, their past relationships with one another, and the political environment in which they operate. These factors are in line with previous literature on the antecedents of coalition formation (Brooker & Meyer, 2019; McCammon & Moon, 2015). However, they gain special significance in the context of contested issues, as they can lower the threshold for collaboration. Based on our findings, we argue that decontestation as a strategy for coalition formation should be understood within the backdrop of these enabling factors.

For the risk/benefit ratio to be acceptable, individual organizations need to consider the potential drawbacks and benefits of forming or joining a cross-sector coalition, especially when the focal issue is potentially contestable across different sectors. Forming such a coalition around a contested issue has implications for participants’ integrity as representatives of their respective sectors; collaboration with another sector may, for example, result in co-optation of the issue (Burchell & Cook, 2013). Some NGOs weighed whether joining the coalition could undermine their credibility with their constituencies:

Starting a cooperative project like this with corporations was an issue that we discussed, and we had to argue for it externally. However, we concluded that the focus of the project or the cooperation was for corporations to demand more regulation for themselves, so we saw that it was not something that would endanger our credibility. (NGO10)

Other NGOs were less hesitant to join the cross-sector collaboration, believing that collaboration would be more effective than contestation. Some even considered corporate involvement a prerequisite for their participation in the campaign, as they profiled themselves as cooperative NGOs:

In the beginning, there were only NGOs and no corporations. For example, my strong take was that we must get corporations on board—period—because it wouldn’t work otherwise. Many others surely had the same idea. (NGO2)

In addition to evaluating the risk/benefit ratio of collaboration, organizational interest in the issue provided a basis for finding a common purpose. Recognizing that there is some organizational interest in addressing the issue increases the likelihood of finding a common purpose, even if the issue might still be contested in specific ways. In this case, a significant enabling factor was the perception that promoting some form of HRDD regulation was, directly or indirectly, in the interest of Finnish corporations. For participating corporations, a direct interest in HRDD and familiarity with UNGPs were key considerations when deciding to join the initial NGO coalition. For example, some corporations had already adopted at least some parts of the UNGPs and viewed them as a guiding framework for their human rights practices:

When the UN’s guiding principles were accepted in 2011, we started examining them right away. They became a sort of background framework, considering what they mean, and we’ve taken many different measures since then.—In Finland, I think it was in 2015 when retail associations, NGOs and the ministry held roundtable discussions, and we developed a common interpretation of how to implement [the UNGPs]. (CORP3)

[Joining the coalition] was easier because we had previously done something related to this issue. We had a better understanding and knowledge of what the UNGPs mean and how they could be applied in practice, so maybe that reduced the fear that this would be something really weird or a difficult issue. (CORP11)

The third enabling factor we identified concerned the relationships between organizations, as highlighted in coalition literature (McCammon & Moon, 2015). Previous joint engagement on CSR issues can provide a foundation for bringing together organizations from different sectors, even if they do not fully agree on how to address the issue at hand. In this case, some NGOs had previously partnered with corporations and were able to invite these partners to join the coalition.

Past relationships can also be a product of the political environment, which we identified as the fourth enabling factor for decontestation strategies. A political setting conducive to cross-sector collaboration can entice organizations to work together on contested issues despite differing views. In this case, Finnish ministries organized round table discussions in 2015, bringing together NGOs and corporations to explore voluntary HRDD implementation in Finland. One of these round tables resulted in a white paper on applying the UNGPs voluntarily. Several participants from these discussions later became members of the coalition. Thus, a political environment that fosters cross-sector participation can create opportunities for collaboration across sectoral boundaries (see CORP 3 quote above).

While these enabling factors increased the likelihood of forming a cross-sector coalition around a contested issue by lowering the threshold for collaboration, they were not sufficient conditions on their own. The decontestation strategies employed by the initiating group of NGOs played a crucial role in convincing firms to join the cross-sector coalition and commit to its cause.

Decontestation in Cross-Sector Coalition Formation

We identified two intertwined mechanisms of decontestation that the coalition used to form the cross-sector coalition: content-related decontestation and process-related decontestation.

Content-Related Decontestation

Content-related decontestation refers to a signification process that defines or limits the scope of the issue at stake in a way that allows actors with diverging interests to collaborate. This approach may involve deliberately avoiding particular specifics and leaving the issue at stake undefined. By explicitly allowing participants to hold different interpretations and agreeing not to delve into contentious details, the coalition can maintain interpretive flexibility on aspects of the issue that might otherwise prevent collaboration.

Bracketing the potentially contested aspects of the issue at hand and agreeing not to seek a consensus on its specifications proved essential in encouraging participants to join. Specifically, the initiating group of NGOs carefully strategized how to formulate their lobbying efforts. Through preliminary discussions with some corporations, they determined how to present the coalition’s objective in a way that would attract broad corporate participation. The following excerpt from the minutes of the coalition’s first formal meeting shows how the coalition deliberately avoided addressing detailed legislative content:

Contents of the upcoming corporate responsibility law:

Not merely a reporting requirement; we need a legally defined minimum standard. However, the coalition will not expend energy on internal conflicts over the precise wording of the regulation or its technical details. Once the statement [calling for HRDD regulation] is incorporated into the government programme and the legislative process has really begun, coalition participants can participate in the legislative process according to normal procedures and pursue their own interests. (First coalition meeting minutes, 12/2017)

As reflected in the meeting minutes and corroborated by the responses from coalition members (see Appendix A), the coalition did not define the specific contents of the “corporate responsibility law” but stated precisely what they would be lobbying for: the incorporation of some form of HRDD regulation in the next government program. This meant that the participants did not have to agree on the specific regulatory meaning of HRDD even if the UNGPs provided a general framework for the potential legislation. We interpret this as a substantive delimitation of corporate responsibility for collaboration. For example, the coalition did not take a stance on how HRDD should be defined in regulatory text and how it should be enforced.

Process-Related Decontestation

Process-related decontestation refers to signification processes that limit the duration of an agreement. This approach allows participants to collaborate on advancing a common cause for a specified period, after which the issue can be re-contested. Such an arrangement can pertain to a particular phase in a regulatory process or to an agreed-upon timeframe for the joint effort.

As the previous extract shows, coalition members agreed to lobby for legislation only until the passing of the government program, which provided a clear temporal boundary for their cross-sector collaboration. In addition, they explicitly agreed that from that moment onwards, the participants would be free to influence the regulatory process according to their individual interests. A corporate representative emphatically explained that they joined the coalition because of this arrangement:

We did not delve into the practical formulations of the regulation. We concluded that it would be premature—so this was only [for] the first phase—that we support mandatory due diligence. (CORP3)

This arrangement also meant that, regardless of the participating organizations’ individual views on HRDD regulation, they acknowledged that the specific details would be determined later during the legislative process. Accordingly, they agreed not to push for any particular formulation of HRDD regulation on behalf of the coalition when engaging with politicians or producing public materials that would conflict with the coalition’s goal. This decision served as a decontestation mechanism that was instrumental to the formation of the coalition.

Both forms of decontestation in coalition formation turned out to be conditioned for the participation of certain (corporate) organizations. In terms of process, it is noteworthy that corporations did not take part in the first formal meeting in which the coalition’s goal was defined. In this sense, the decontestation was not an explicitly negotiated outcome but rather a strategic decision made by the coalition’s initiators in anticipation of how corporations would perceive its purpose. Several corporate participants argued that the coalition’s limited nature was a necessary condition for their participation:

Well, our only condition for signing [joining the coalition] was precisely that this coalition does not, in any case draft the legislative text. So, the condition that we don’t, that the only thing we support that there would be a statement in the government programme to initiate an investigation and, potentially, future legislation. (CORP2)

Thus, somewhat unexpectedly, corporations were willing to tolerate a degree of ambiguity and risk regarding the possible outcomes of the cross-sector collaboration. However, their interest in the issue (an enabling factor), combined with the explicit limits of the collaboration and the possibility for recontestation afterward, made it feasible for them to join the coalition.

The inclusion of corporations, achieved through decontestation, was essential for enhancing the coalition’s credibility. Even the participation of a few corporations conferred an appearance of broader business support and broke the ranks of monolithic corporate presentation by industry associations. In Finland, industry associations have a strong position in lobbying for their members, while individual corporations rarely take a public stance on specific issues. The involvement of corporate participants allowed the campaign coalition to leverage business support for the proposed law and counter unified corporate representation by claiming that some of the Finnish businesses were in favor of regulation. This dynamic contributed to the absence of overt conflict between sectors:

A diverse coalition could then suck the air out of the conflict in some way through just that—so because we had a large group of corporations, it became much more difficult to construct the argument [against us] that we were building regulations that would damage the competitiveness of Finnish companies. As a result, the groups critical of this were silent. (NGO7)

Thus, it made sense for the initiating group of NGOs to bring some corporations on board by decontesting the issue—perhaps taking a risk in cooperating with businesses and compromising the specifics of the law—rather than excluding them from the coalition. While one might assume that cross-sector coalitions must define their purpose comprehensively to overcome ideological differences (Cloutier & Langley, 2017), decontestation may offer a more effective strategy for cross-sector coalition formation when the coalition’s purpose is to delegate the responsibility for crafting a solution to another actor.

Decontestation in Lobbying for the Issue

In addition to decontestation as a strategy to build a cross-sector coalition, it can also be applied to garner support for the issue from other audiences. Analytically, a distinction can be made between an inside strategy of directly lobbying politicians and an outside strategy of raising public awareness to promote the issue (Colli & Adriaensen, 2020). Since these strategies target different audiences, the mechanisms and opportunities for decontestation must also vary. We identified three specific mechanisms of decontestation employed by the coalition: inclusive lobbying directed at politicians, non-threatening public communication, and diversified communication directed at the general public.

Inclusive Lobbying as a Means of Decontestation

We identified inclusive lobbying as a key decontestation mechanism for garnering support from political decision-makers across the political spectrum, thereby keeping the focal issue beyond the appropriation of any single political party and avoiding its partisanization. This strategy involves engaging all major political factions while deliberately avoiding close association with any one political inclination. The effectiveness of this strategy was conditioned not only by uncertainties in the political environment but also by coalition-internal requirements that affected how the coalition could conduct its lobbying. The outcome of inclusive lobbying was a generally positive—or at least neutral—attitude toward the issue among politicians.

The political environment had set boundary conditions for employing decontestation as a strategy targeting political decision-makers. The timing of the campaign was tailored to the Finnish political system, in which the most effective way to promote new legislation is to secure its inclusion in the policy program of the incoming government. This context necessitates lobbying individual political parties prior to parliamentary elections.

Given this context, the coalition decided to address all the major parties in its lobbying efforts. As there was no way of predicting which parties would constitute the new government, the coalition sought to hedge its bets by securing endorsements from politicians across the major factions. Thus, although the campaign’s window of opportunity was tied to the electoral cycle, the coalition carefully considered how to make the most of this timing:

The goal was, of course, that whichever parties formed the government, we had support from every party. At no point did we rely on any specific government composition [to achieve the goal], but rather, we sought to consider everyone and approach each party and actor from a perspective that would resonate with them. (NGO5)

On the other hand, the need for decontestation as an inside lobbying strategy also stemmed from the internal requirements of coalition members. Inclusive lobbying was a prerequisite for some of the coalition participants, particularly corporations, because they did not want to be perceived as endorsing any specific political agenda. Their insistence on maintaining political neutrality influenced how the campaign could be conducted:

If it [the campaign] had been tied to any one party, whichever party, then it would have been an immediately like never, that we do not want to, nor can we, engage in politics that way. (CORP2)

The coalition’s lobbying work was guided by two preliminary goals: to secure the inclusion of HRDD regulation in the party programs of individual political parties and to ensure that no party opposed the regulation (internal materials, lobbying plan). To obtain a positive—or at least neutral—response from all major parties, the coalition deliberately framed the issue of HRDD regulation in a way that would prevent it from becoming politically partisan or associated with any one faction. This approach also sought to avoid allowing any political party to claim “issue ownership.” Thus, the coalition conducted a “power mapping” of parties and listed “champions” within them to prioritize meetings (internal materials, lobbying plan), ultimately organizing at least 50 meetings with politicians. While the coalition could have capitalized on strong support from certain parties, it intentionally distanced itself to avoid partisanization of the issue, which could have led to overt contestation:

For example, we were quite dismissive towards [party 1]; they had taken a stance in favour of national regulation [on BHR] about a year before our campaign started. Still, we did not give them any special opportunity to cooperate with us. This was a strategic decision based on our situation analysis. We knew we could not get this into the government programme if we allied ourselves with [party 1] and [party2]. People in parties are very cognisant of who initiates a proposal and whose, so it was really significant for us to show and honestly say to [party 3] and [party 4] that this was not an agenda of any one party. It was the agenda of the coalition. (NGO2)

As a result of this decontestation, politicians across the political spectrum could take a stance on the issue. For example, members of the Green Party and the Left Alliance could emphasize the importance of respecting human rights, whereas some representatives from the Nationalist Party could endorse the idea that no Finnish work is to be outsourced to countries where cheap labor might be available due to abuse of human rights. Overall, the coalition managed to secure commitments to support the HRDD regulation from 600 electoral candidates, with 3 (out of the 7 lobbied) parties incorporating a statement on the topic into their party programmes (internal materials, final meeting).

Thus, decontestation as an inside lobbying strategy addressed both the uncertainty of the political environment and the political preferences of participating organizations by preventing issue partisanization. This is particularly relevant in a context in which the government is a multi-party coalition.

Non-Threatening and Diversified Communication as a Means of Decontestation

Decontestation also shaped the coalition’s communication strategy toward the general public, aiming to gather support from other organizations and citizens. We identified two mechanisms that supported this decontestation. First, non-threatening communication framed the issue positively and avoided positioning it as antagonistic to any particular interest group. Second, diversified messaging involved participants tailoring their communications to their respective audiences, which enhanced the campaign’s reach and highlighted its cross-sectoral nature. Although this decontested communication strategy did not generate overwhelming public support, it likely prevented the formation of organized opposition against the issue because the decontested communication offered little opportunity for critique.

The diversity of organizations in the cross-sector coalition posed a challenge to its public communication strategy. This challenge was addressed by selecting a positive, unifying signifier for the overall message that would be acceptable to all participants. The campaign was framed as “providing solutions, activating and challenging” (internal materials, communication plan) to engage a broad audience. Following a workshop and a proposal from a communication agency, the coalition decided to center its public message around the hashtag #Ykkösketjuun (Finnish for “to the first line”), as the concept of HRDD was deemed unwieldy for public communication. The term ykkösketju is a sports metaphor referencing the first line in ice hockey teams, that is, the best players of the team. The campaign name thus implied that Finland should aspire to be among the best in respecting human rights. In Finland, where ice hockey is the most popular sport, using a sports metaphor was perceived as politically neutral. The name also had potential in terms of profiling the effort as rather harmless: #Ykkösketjuun does not stand against anything, and it has positive patriotic connotations. This positive and ambiguous signifier—because of its use of metaphor—accommodated the diversity of NGOs, labor unions and corporations that participated in the coalition. The following quote illustrates how the coalition members perceived the nature of the public message:

Well, I think—or at least I like to think—that finding this concept for the campaign had a big impact. It’s like a core that fits very different things. It had the pride of Finnish work for labour unions, then on the other hand something like progressive human rights advocacy for NGOs and a fresh take on responsibility for corporations. (CORP4)

This focus on a positive public message can be interpreted as a means of decontesting the issue for the general public because it framed the campaign as positive and non-threatening to anyone’s interests, making it a cause that anyone could support.

To increase the campaign’s reach, the coalition not only created joint campaign messages endorsed by all participants but also encouraged them to communicate with their own audiences through various channels, including newsletters and social media. The coalition implemented “communication weeks,” during which a designated organization took primary responsibility for basic campaign communication (internal documents, meeting minutes, 5/2018). Participants were allowed to tailor the messages to fit their own constituencies, effectively diversifying the public message. The following examples illustrate how a corporation emphasized historical legacy to explain its support for the campaign:

[A corporation] has been developing Finnish society for over 100 years. We continue on this path by joining the #Ykkösketjuun campaign, which brings human rights into focus. (Corporate blog, August 24, 2018)

Meanwhile, a union attached the issue to other regulatory issues:

Getting corporate responsibility law in the next government programme is one of [a labour union’s] goals for the upcoming government. It is important for the union that human rights are considered when municipalities and the state procure various materials. (Labour union news, February 21, 2019)

The diversity in how different campaign participants framed their public messages served a dual purpose: not only did it aim to build broader public support, but it also showcased that HRDD regulation was not aligned with the political or economic interests of any specific sector. Indeed, there was little public contestation of the issue or stigmatization of the campaign as, for example, an NGO project.

While the tone of the public campaign was overwhelmingly positive, and the coalition managed to collect over 10,000 petition signatures from citizens, the actual traction and visibility of the campaign were somewhat low. For example, the hashtag was tweeted or retweeted only 3,305 times during the campaign, a relatively low figure for a campaign that ran for several months. One participant reflected on a possible reason for the lack of public attention:

[The campaign] never reached the kind of frenzy we might have hoped for.—when it [the issue] is too “hygge” then you don’t bother to support the issue, like it does not move you at all, so that you would go and do so. (NGO4)

The campaign’s non-confrontational, “hygge” tone rendered the issue insufficiently provocative to spark widespread counter-reactions and public discussion. We interpret this as a successful outcome of decontestation in the sense that the issue was not publicly contested. Some participants considered the lack of public attention as beneficial for the goal of the campaign, as the following quote illustrates:

I think the industry side was caught with their pants down—only at the last moment did they realise we had been doing this quite visibly and got big name politicians involved. It was something of a surprise this dabbling of hippies. (UNI2)

It is often assumed that publicity benefits civil society actors by raising issue awareness and increasing its salience in societal discussions. However, in this case, the absence of public discussion did not appear to hinder the campaign’s success. On the contrary, the lack of controversy around the campaign may have made it easier to obtain a commitment to HRDD regulation from politicians. This suggests that, beyond enabling broad political support, decontestation can also mitigate opposition by avoiding heated public discussion. Nonetheless, it should be noted that counter-lobbying could have occurred beyond the public view in this case.

Cross-Sector Coalition Exit

The process-related decontestation established a limit on the duration of the decontestation. It was agreed that, thereafter, its former participants would be free to advocate for their own preferred interpretation of HRDD and its regulation. Once the campaign ended in June 2019 and the coalition was disbanded, the issue was recontested. Recontestation took different forms: some of the former coalition members provided detailed suggestions regarding previously decontested aspects of the issue, whereas another participant withdrew their support for the national HRDD regulation.

In the Finnish case, the decontestation of the issue was delimited by the parliamentary approval of the new government program. After the parliamentary election, five political parties agreed to negotiate the formation of a new government. As its final lobbying action, the coalition positioned itself outside the negotiation venue, reminding politicians of their commitment to HRDD regulation. A statement regarding due diligence was included in the government program, marking the coalition’s success, although some coalition participants deemed the statement weaker than they had hoped:

A report will be prepared with the objective of enacting a corporate social responsibility act based on a duty of care imposed on companies regarding their operations in Finland and abroad. (Government programme, 2019)

The cross-sector coalition was disbanded after the election, which created room for recontesting the issue. From that point onwards, the various participant organizations could start their own specific lobbying practices. For example, Finnwatch, the primary organizer of the coalition, continued lobbying for the legislation with specific content suggestions for the regulation that went beyond the scope of the coalition agreement. The following quote illustrates the level of detail in their comments:

Finnwatch does not support the use of modifiers such as “serious”, “significant” or “substantial” that limit the scope of application of corporate responsibility law when describing the human rights impacts that corporations have to be aware of and have the duty to prevent, alleviate and remedy. (Public stakeholder hearing comments, Ministry of Labour, September 30, 2020)

The national process was, however, hindered by the announcement in April that a European Union-level directive on due diligence was being developed. One of the organizations involved in the coalition publicly announced that it no longer supported national regulation because of this development. Despite support from their individual candidates prior to the elections, two political parties in the government coalition announced in April 2022, when the regulatory review process had ended, that they would no longer support the drafting of a national HRDD law. The developments at the EU level were most likely the reason for their withdrawal of support, as one civil servant commented:

Now, it’s public that the Centre Party and the Swedish People’s Party do not support this national, that there would be a separate national legislative proposal before passing the directive. (CS1)

Thus, while decontestation was effective in instigating the regulatory process, the HRDD regulation had not gained sufficiently strong political support for the next step of drafting the actual legislation in the face of a supranational regulatory initiative.

Model of Decontestation in Cross-Sector Collaboration

Based on our analysis, we propose a model of cross-sector coalition formation and subsequent lobbying that relies on decontestation as a core strategy (Figure 2). First, every coalition is situated in a context that conditions its formation and the possible strategies it can adopt. The list of enabling factors is based on our analysis and should not be considered exhaustive. These enabling factors may lower the threshold for collaboration around a contested issue.

Figure 2.

Decontestation in Coalition Formation and Coalition Action.

In coalitions that aim to hold other actors responsible for solving an issue, accommodating the diverging interests of potential members of the coalition can be accomplished through decontestation of the focal issue. This decontestation can address both content- and process-related aspects of the issue at stake by agreeing to leave contested aspects outside the coalition’s actions (content-related decontestation) and agreeing on a clear timeframe for the coalition’s action (process-related decontestation). Such decontestation may increase the number of organizations from different sectors with diverging interests that are willing to join the coalition. This allows the coalition to draw on a larger pool of resources and provides it with the possibility of countering the articulation of a monolithic opposition to the issue.

As for the coalition’s action, we argue that decontestation can be relevant for the efficacy of both inside and outside lobbying strategies targeting politicians and the general public. The execution of these strategies can be conditioned by the political environment and the requirements of coalition members. Inclusive lobbying that targets a spectrum of political factions without privileging any one of them is a mechanism of decontestation that can prevent the issue from being subjected to partisan politics, thereby increasing the likelihood of garnering broad political support. Regarding the general public, non-threatening and diversified public communication are mechanisms of decontestation that can be effective in preventing public debate and stigmatization, but they may be limited in their ability to garner public support.

Finally, it is likely that the issue at stake will be recontested once the coalition has been dissolved, not only because the participants’ diverging interests become relevant again but also due to unexpected or unforeseen events or changes in the wider societal context.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this study, we have sought to understand how cross-sector collaborations can be formed around contested corporate responsibility issues and how such coalitions can operate in lobbying governments to regulate businesses. By conducting a case study on a Finnish cross-sector coalition, we have demonstrated how decontestation can function as a means of developing and facilitating cross-sector collaborative action. We make two contributions: one to the literature on the decontestation of corporate responsibility and another to the study of cross-sector collaborations.

First, we expand the meaning of decontestation of CSR as currently understood in the literature. In the context of cross-sector lobbying collaborations, we define decontestation as the adoption of mechanisms that prevent a CSR issue from becoming contested among a set of stakeholders, thus enabling collaboration and support for the issue. Our findings show how decontestation can be operationalized through different mechanisms that not only concern how the issue itself is defined but also who can speak for the issue and the style of communication used to discuss it. Specifically, our findings allow us to elaborate on how decontestation functions in relation to three different stakeholders: potential collaborators, political decision-makers, and the general public. In relation to potential collaborators, decontestation can take place by bracketing out contested aspects of the issue and reaching explicit agreement on the delimitations of collaboration, which enables the formation of a cross-sector coalition. Decontestation can also help gather support for the contested issue from political decision-makers by avoiding issue partisanization through inclusive lobbying and from the public through the use of non-threatening and diversified communication that avoids overt contestation. We distinguish these modes of decontestation from other forms that refer to narrative processes of legitimizing CSR (Feix & Philippe, 2020) or depoliticizing CSR through “objective” measurements (van den Broek, 2024). As the actors involved can explicitly agree on limits to their agreement, we argue that decontestation does not necessarily lead to “depoliticization” (van den Broek, 2024, p. 21) nor inhibit alternative, critical views of CSR (Feix & Philippe, 2020). In the case we studied, the coalition participants did not cease to disagree; instead, they focused on areas of agreement and on what they could jointly accomplish. Once they achieved their limited goal, the issue was “recontested.” This underscores the temporal and the processual character of decontestation: with explicit delimitations, co-optation and depoliticization of the issue was avoided.

Second, we suggest that focusing on the specific mechanisms through which the meaning of the focal issue is established and promoted can complement other ways of examining how cross-sector collaborations are formed and how they can operate around contested issues. Cloutier and Langley (2017, p. 121) emphasized “the importance of considering how potential collaboration partners view and define the purpose of their collaborative endeavour” when examining cross-sector organizing. Accordingly, the meaning of the specific issue must be managed in such a way as to attract support for collective action, sometimes from actors whose interests are not perfectly aligned. Klitsie et al. (2018) proposed that by maintaining frame plurality around controversial issues, cross-sector collaborations can continue to function over prolonged periods. We suggest that through decontestation, cross-sector coalitions can establish a common purpose by explicitly setting aside contested aspects of the issue for an agreed period, thus avoiding challenges to collaboration rather than seeking a compromise or uneasily tolerating one another. We argue that this strategy can facilitate the forging of temporal alliances among organizations that might otherwise struggle to find common ground.

We also draw attention to how the strategies used in forming a lobbying coalition may carry over to the strategies they use in their advocacy work. We suggest that organizations might prefer decontestation as a means of lobbying the issue if the conflict is deemed an undesirable means and end in the political context. In countries where politicians are accessible, there may be no need to draw attention to the issue through public conflict, which is often assumed as a source of power (Gamson, 2004). In such cases, planning both inside and outside lobbying strategies to maintain political neutrality and avoid overt confrontation can provide an effective alternative to more radical forms of activism. Thus, we contribute to the understanding of specific strategies that cross-sector collaborations can employ to build support for an issue.

However, it must be noted that strategies of decontestation may apply only to atypical collaborations. The #Ykkösketjuun coalition, like other similar coalitions, is not a typical form of cross-sector collaboration. Its purpose was to organize a joint, cross-sector advocacy for legislation through political lobbying, delegating the responsibility to the government, rather than developing a solution themselves, as seen in more common examples of “private regulation” by various multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Whether decontestation is a viable or even needed strategy for contestation in and around MSIs (Fougère & Solitander, 2020), is an open question.

In addition to being limited by the type of advocacy collaboration, our contributions are closely connected with the political context of the study. The Finnish coalition formation and lobbying process deviated from the traditional notion of successful coalitions involving ideologically aligned members, as in the French HRDD law lobbying process (Delalieux, 2020; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2021). The Finnish coalition focused on highly pragmatic objectives while consciously dampening the political aspects during the lobbying process, leaving little to chance. This is in contrast to the French case, which saw the eventual adoption of the HRDD law due to a fortunate combination of circumstances after years of stalled progress (Delalieux, 2020).

Decontestation may also have its drawbacks. It could inadvertently lead to situations where the goal is diluted to such an extent that there is little to be gained from collaboration. Moreover, audiences of decontestation might perceive the issue as not topical or relevant if the decontestation makes it seem that no action is needed. Based on our analysis, it appears that if the cross-sector coalition has the capacity to efficiently address one audience (such as politicians), the lack of reaction from another audience (such as the public) might not be detrimental to the effort.

Our study raises questions regarding decontestation in other contexts. Investigating when and how decontestation strategies fail or succeed in coalition formation and action could help clarify their application. Furthermore, studying issue-specific characteristics that affect decontestation would be valuable. For instance, examining how specific business and society issues are influenced by and, in turn, affect decontestation could further our understanding of this approach to fostering cross-sector collaboration on contested issues.