disagreements during MSG meetings, additional decisions also create opportunities for discord. The MSG can easily get overwhelmed and fail to resolve a large volume of choices.

Problems with decision-making have arisen in several CoST MSGs, including the group in Tanzania. As the initiative progressed beyond its early stages, the MSG was called to make more frequent decisions and struggled to keep up with this burden. As one participant describes, “The challenge has been that we need decisions, now that we are in the most critical stage of CoST. These decisions are often required earlier than we think.” Moreover, the MSG has frequently used meeting time to revisit previously resolved debates at the expense of more pressing issues. The MSG coordinator has encouraged members to email their opinions on key questions prior to meetings, but this strategy has proven largely unsuccessful, as many members do not check or read their emails on a regular basis. Observers of the Zambia MSG describe a similar situation, where valuable meeting time is lost debating “mundane decisions” at the expense of broader, more strategic questions.

Beyond the ability to drive implementation forward with efficient decision-making, organizational efficacy requires each member to have the authority and capacity to fulfill his designated role. The multistakeholder ideal holds that each stakeholder will have input into the process and contribute its comparative advantage, but in practice, MSGs may be constrained by _imbalances of power and capacity across stakeholder groups._ As suggested in the state-society relations research, civil society organizations may be weak or nonexistent in many developing countries (Bratton, 1989; Rakner, 2010; Fukuyama, 2001). This “missing stakeholder” problem may be particularly pervasive in initiatives concerning complex government processes like construction, as there are generally few local NGOs even focused on such issues, let alone with the capacity to engage effectively. Without effective representation from civil society, an MSG can quickly become dominated by government actors, and the title of “multi-stakeholder group” becomes something of a misnomer.<sup>7</sup> Experiences from the CoST pilot countries suggest that this “imbalance of capacity” issue is a serious barrier to implementation for many MSGs. The Ethiopian government recently passed the Charities and Societies Act, known locally as the CSO law, which sets up restrictions on non-profit organizations. Any NGO that receives more than 10% of funding from outside sources is considered a “foreign NGO” and is disallowed from conducting activities relating to development advocacy, human rights, democratic governance, and conflict resolution. The law further weakens an already-stunted civil society. Although CSOs comprise 30% of the CoST Ethiopia MSG, there are concerns as to whether civil society will serve as an effective link to the public. Observers of CoST in Zambia and Vietnam have echoed these concerns.

> 7 These power and capacity disparities tend to manifest themselves during multi-stakeholder negotiations. Scholars of multistakeholder platforms (MSPs) designed to manage common pool resources warn that for weaker groups, “more often than not, participation is little more than token consultation, with no decision-making power in the hands of the people concerned” (Wester, Merrey, and de Lange, 2003; Faysse, 2006; Edmunds and Wollenberg, 2001).

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