Multi-Equal Stakeholderism (was Re: [bestbits] Joint civil society endorsements for London meeting of High-Level Panel)

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 1 Dec 2013, at 7:19 am, McTim <mctimconsulting at gmail.com> wrote:

> , since many would say the IETF is not multi-stakeholder all,
> 
> I've never met anyone who has ever said that.  Are you actually trying to make that claim?

Hardly just me, a lot of people were saying so during the last IGF; it was a recurring theme that the term "multi-stakeholderism" had become meaningless because it was being applied to anything and everything.  Although this came through strongly at a number of workshops, i particularly recall that it came up at the pre-event "Technical standards and metrics for measurable impact of multi-stakeholderism" (http://www.internet-science.eu/igf-workshop-2013).  I don't have time right now to look for specific references, but I suspect this observation may have also been made by CIGI (who were co-organisers of that pre-event) in their series of papers at http://www.cigionline.org/series/internet-governance.  This is not to say that the IETF isn't procedurally open, but it isn't multi-stakeholder in any meaningful sense.

Hence the emergence of a range of more specific terms of which multi-equal stakeholderism is only one, and not even the ugliest.

> Stakeholder groupings are artificial boundaries imposed on us at WSIS by government types.
> 
> It is NOT the way Internet policy has been made during the first 3 decades of Internet existence.

And they never claimed to be multi-stakeholder back then, either.

Though it's still a work in progress, our session at the Best Bits meeting in Bali towards defining multi-stakeholderism made the point very clearly that it required a balancing of power differences between stakeholder groups.  This is vital, otherwise the perspectives of the powerless are simply drowned out.  Rough notes are at http://igcaucus.org:9001/p/bb-ms.

-- 
Dr Jeremy Malcolm
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