[governance] IGF Financing (and structuring)

[Meryem Marzouki]

Hi all,

I understand this list is now rather busy with the workshops issue,  
and their approval criteria, but this discussion on IGF financing and  
structuring should remain an important concern. As a matter of fact,  
"The role and mandate of the IGF" has been proposed by Parminder as  
one of possible themes for workshop proposal by this caucus.
The discussion on approval criteria is also linked to this thread:  
who will approve workshops proposals? A MAG without any mandate?  
Unless I missed the annoucement of the current MAG being confirmed,  
it seems that the it doesn't exist anymore, although some of its  
members are currently making strong affirmations on what they would  
accept and what they would reject: this situation is surrealistic.

As for the ongoing discussion:

Le 15 juin 07 à 17:05, Milton Mueller a écrit :

> Meryem et al
>
>>>> marzouki at ras.eu.org 6/13/2007 12:52:38 PM >>>
>> the best answer would remain making the IGF structure as
>> light as possible, thus as cheap as possible.
>
> Yes, indeed, we are in complete agreement here. I am just talking  
> about
> funding the Secretariat. Which is less than US$ 1 million/year. So in
> that case, the idea of stakeholder quotas is not so crazy.

The problem with the stakeholder quotas idea (or contributions or  
shares, if the word 'quota' is likely to drift us away from the main  
discussion issue) is that it turns - sooner or later - the IGF into a  
shareholders-owned body. With or without fixed or maximum shares,  
collected through micro-funding or giga-funding, this would  
institutionalize the IGF as a privatized governance body. This  
privatized governance may be tuned or balanced among different  
categories of shareholders, through imposed diversification of money  
sources, or indeed through quotas, this is only a scaling process,  
but the main principle remains the same.
Obviously, the weight of lobbies cannot be ignored, even with the  
current IGF funding structure ("extra-budgetary contributions paid  
into a multi-donor Trust Fund administered by the United Nations", as  
we can read from IGF website). Yet, this remains "classical"  
lobbying, very different from institutionalized privatization.

> E.g., if the
> civil society portion of it is 20% it is not inconceivable that we  
> find
> two or three foundations willing to pony up $100-200,000 per year, or
> develop some other aggregation of civil society capacity to fundraise.
> (Think of MoveOn.org)

Again, the main issue is not really how much funding CS can collect.  
I simply expressed doubts on its capacity to contribute, on a stable  
basis, as a side issue. You suggest MoveOn.org as an example of  
campaign fundraising. There are many others, but this cannot apply to  
IGF. We're not talking here of a like-minded group of people and  
organizations (how broad it can be), with identified objectives and  
identified _common_ advocacy goals, we're rather dealing with a  
global governance body, which aim is to (ultimately) make or help  
making public policy, if only through putting (or not) these issues  
on the table.

If this supposedly highly innovative and desirable model of public  
policy shareholders should be adopted by the IGF, why not extending  
it to other UN bodies and programmes, e.g. to UNEP (UN Environment  
Programme) or any other, instead of the current system of fundations,  
the UNFIP (UN Fund for International Partnerships)? BTW, UNFIP  
"supports and complements the work of the United Nations departments,  
offices, conferences and summits, and their follow-up mechanisms  
which are engaged in similar efforts, including: [...] The World  
Summit on Information Society (WSIS)".

>> Can't we learn from existing examples? e.g. ITU.
>
> It's good to bring up this example, but it's not close to what I  
> had in
> mind, as the discussion above makes clear. In particular, I am not
> talking about membership fees being a precondition of participation --
> which it is in the ITU.

I brought this example because you added to your MS quotas funding  
suggestion this wise comment: "Maybe this requires some kind of  
"membership" in which participants get certified as belonging to some  
sector and once so recognized, assume some kind of honorary  
obligation to meet those quotas.", and indeed I agree that this  
funding system would require this. Maybe this wouldn't make it a  
sharp prerequisite for participation, as the IGF is not an agency  
like the ITU, but rather a yet loosely defined forum, but in practice  
and through this kind of institutionalization, this would eventually  
become a necessary condition. Even in its current form, participation  
to the IGF meetings requires registration, and registration approval  
is based on criteria.

>> [and speaking of learning from existing examples, setting up
>> something new outside of the UN system may well look like
>> ICANN, even leaving aside the US DoC issue. Would anyone
>> (except Veni:)) here argue that ICANN would be the example
>
> You can't compare ICANN to IGF because ICANN really does authoritative
> governance [...]. IGF would do none of
> those things.

In exactly the same way and for the same reasons as we cannot compare  
ITU to IGF. The point is not to make comparisons, but to provide  
examples of risks to be avoided. How long do you think it would take  
to IGF doing actual governance, as soon as privatized governance is  
institutionalized through a shareholders funding system?

>
>> Why IGF financing would necessarily require huge amounts of
>> money?
>
> It doesn't, who said it does?

So, we agree on this, just like we agree that the point is funding a  
secretariat. Not grants for participation from less developed  
countries, not sponsorship of particular events, etc., which should  
remain funded through other means. And this leads us to the IGF  
structuring, as the issues are closely interrelated. If you don't  
mind, I'd repeat below the last part of my previous mail, which  
remained unanswered:

===
This is not a financing question only. This is closely related to the  
IGF institutional structure discussion ("bureau or not bureau"). All  
the proposals and ideas droped on this list started with a very  
complex structure trying to ensure representation of all stakeholders  
while denying this representation objectives, and ended by ensuring  
that this bureau/secretariat/whatever shouldn't of course have any  
decision-making powers. Why then should they obey a so thoroughly  
devised membership?

Let's try to answer a very simple question: wouldn't it be possible  
to organize the whole IGF activities with a secretariat composed by X  
persons, who can be civil servants delegated by some governments in  
turn, plus some project officers from various concerned IGOs, also in  
turn, plus local logistics provided by the host country for each  
annual meeting (with sponsors of _this_ particular event if needed,  
from any economic sector: after all, such international events are  
good for e.g. the tourism sector, probably more than for the Internet  
sector, given their achievements...). These people skills should only  
be organizational, administrative. Substance (agenda setting, etc.)  
provided by contributions from anyone/any group/any institution  
interested. We only need some rules to organize all this and to  
guarantee that anyone/any group/any institution has equal/equitable  
access to resources. Working on such rules would be far more  
interesting that discussing ways of structuring and financing IGF.
===

To make my point clearer, why do we need a MAG or a bureau?

Meryem

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