Caught in the inclusion trap: multistakeholder institutions and autocratic accommodation

Multistakeholder institutions were designed to stabilise the liberal international order by widening participation, empowering technical expertise, and privileging consensual problem-solving. We identify a ‘failure through success dynamic’ that creates an ‘inclusion trap’ in the context of autocratic market expansion: as illiberal actors gain economic power, they become functionally indispensable for effective governance, necessitating their inclusion to MS governance institutions. After inclusion, the trap unfolds in three steps: (1) increased market share creates functional accommodation pressures that translate into greater representation within multistakeholder institutions; (2) greater institutional accommodation gets reinforced by bureaucratic survival imperatives, encountering backlash from liberal actors and inadvertently undermining liberal institutional principles; and (3) the bureaucratic enforcement leads to increased institutional power of autocratic-aligned actors, facilitating institutional exploitation. Using mixed-methods analysis combining quantitative market share and representation data with qualitative process tracing, we examine China's increasing representation in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as a plausibility probe. Our findings suggest that as autocratic market expansion continues, multistakeholder governance models must adapt to ensure survival while preventing internal autocratization.