Multistakeholder governance is a practice of governance that employs bringing multiple stakeholders together to participate in dialogue, decision making, and implementation of responses to jointly perceived problems. The principle behind such a structure is that if enough input is provided by multiple types of actors involved in a question, the eventual consensual decision gains more legitimacy, and can be more effectively implemented than a traditional state-based response. While the evolution of multistakeholder governance is occurring principally at the international level, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are domestic analogues.

Stakeholders refer to a collection of actors from different social, political, economic spheres working intentionally together to govern a physical, social, economic, or policy area. The range of actors can include multinational corporations, national enterprises, governments, civil society bodies, academic experts, community leaders, religious figures, media personalities and other institutional groups.

At a minimum a multistakeholder group must have two or more actors from different social, political, or economic groups. If not, then the group is a trade association (all business groups), a multilateral body (all governments), a professional body (all scholars), etc. Almost all multistakeholder bodies have at least one multinational corporation or business-affiliated body and at least one civil society organization or alliance of civil society organizations as key members.

Alternative terminologies for multistakeholder governance include multi-stakeholder initiatives(MSIs), Multi-StakeHolder (MSH), multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs), public-private partnerships (PPPs), transnational multistakeholder Partnerships (transnational MSPs), informal governance arrangements, and non-state regulation.

The key term 'multistakeholder' (or 'multistakeholderism') is increasingly spelled without a hyphen to maintain consistency with its predecessor 'multilateralism' and to associate this new form of governance with one of the key actors involved that is also generally spelled without a hyphen; 'multinationals'. 'Multistakeholderism' is similarly used in parallel to bilateralism and regionalism.

As an evolving global governance form, only a limited number of organizations and institutions are involved in multistakeholderism. In a number of arenas, opposing forces are actively challenging the legitimacy, accountability, and effectiveness of these experimental changes in global governance.

Stakeholder management theory, stakeholder project management theory, and stakeholder government agency theory have all contributed to the intellectual foundation for multistakeholder governance. The history and theory of multistakeholder governance however departs from these models in four ways. The earlier theories describe how a central institution (be it a business, a project, or a government agency) should engage more formally with related institutions (be it other organizations, institutions, or communities). In multistakeholder governance, the central element of multistakeholder undertaking is a public concern (e.g. protection of the climate, management of the internet, or the use of natural resources), not a pre-existing organization. Second, the earlier theories aimed to strengthen a pre-existing institution. In multistakeholder governance, multistakeholder groups can strengthen associated institutions but they can also marginalize institutions or functions of existing governance bodies (e.g. governmental regulatory authorities, UN system). As earlier theories were concerned with improving the operations of corporations and project management, they did not need to address the public governance consequences of multistakeholder decision-making. They also provide little or no guidance to autonomous multistakeholder groups on their internal rules of governance, as the pre-existing institution had its own functioning decision-making system.^{[citation needed]}

As multistakeholderism is an evolving system of governance, a good deal of its theoretical underpinning is a combination of formal theoretical writing and theory-derived from practice.^{[citation needed]}