[governance] "stakeholder" - a misleading term!?

[Norbert Bollow]

Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:

> And (again) my own personal feeling is that we ought to empower the 
> creativity and aspirations of individual people to create better 
> families, better communities, better nations; that the concept of 
> "stakeholder" gets us off on the wrong foot right from the start.

In fact I agree with your point, even though I'm using the term
"stakeholder" anyway.

I'm sure that we all agree about the fundamental reality that the way
to influence the future of the 'net goes via influencing whatever
companies are the major actors in the areas of implementing network
infrastructure and of putting software on end-user PCs.

The appropriate way of influencing what these companies are allowed
to do is to convince governments, so that then the governments will
establish appropriate laws and other forms of regulation.

Therefore, governance should be organized in a manner which roughly
resembles the chain of command

  civil society -> government -> industry

Here, with "civil society" I mean everyone who genuinely represents
the goal of empowering (as you put it so well) "the creativity and
aspirations of individual people to create better families, better
communities, better nations".

The "multistakeholder" concept has been easy to accept, for a variety
of reasons, which are probably along these lines:

- Civil society orginizations are happy that they get to be included
  in UN-level conversations at all, which was not previously the case.

- Governments are happy that they get to be included in internet
  governance at all, since the internet is something that was
  previously organized by technical people and businesses without
  direct influence from governments.

- Industry representatives are happy to get formal recognition as an
  important stakeholder group, rather than formally being at the end
  of a chain-of-command, like they have so far formally been at least
  theoretically in every nation that claims to have a democratic
  form of government.

- When properly understood, the "multistakeholder" concept is just
  and not in violation of the chain-of-command principle outlined
  above:  In any just decision-making process, the interests, felt
  needs and verifiable needs of all stakeholder groups must be
  considered, and communication between all stakeholders must be
  facilitated.

As I see it, the danger is that the "multistakeholder" concept gets
interpreted as providing a governance-theoretical justification for
continuing the current bad and morally unacceptable practices of
allowing greedy business interests to override human rights
concerns.

In my proposals, I try to address this issue by endorsing the
"multistakeholder" principle while at the same time emphasising the
importance of imposing an _enforcable_ obligation on all governance
bodies that they must assign greater importance to human rights
concerns than to any other kind of concerns.
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