[governance] Re: [igsd] Summary and Thanks - e-conference on Internet Governance and Sustainable Development

[Norbert Bollow]

Kwasi Boakye-Akyeampong <kboakye1 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> With the governments I think there is. All governments have drafted
> National ICT documents. If we can press the right buttons, we can get
> them to support some of these initiatives. Believe most of these
> governments are not tyrants as we are wont to suggest.

I tend to think of governments as organizations consisting of people
who will, due to time and resource constraints, be able to address
only some of the issues which are brought to their attention.

Furthermore it seems realistic to assume that whenever there are no
clear rules about which issues should be addressed, most government
officials will, when making their choices about which issues they will
address, tend to be strongly influenced by considerations about which
choices will be beneficial for their own careers and their political
allies.

Obviously there are strong incentives for governments to draft
"National ICT documents", since if a government doesn't do this, it is
obvious that that government is not doing its job properly.

Whether there are also strong incentives to do the "National ICT
documents" drafting work seriously, so that the resulting documents
are suitable for directing action on the topics which they cover,
is a different question.

I would suggest that whether the "National ICT documents" are
practically useful instruments of policy or not is very likely
something that varies from country to country.

To summarize, I do not think that it is logically possible to draw any
conclusions from the existence of "National ICT documents".

> Some of the bad policies are due to ignorance

I would say that such ignorance is a clear indication of insufficient
incentives for taking appropriate and effective action.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org
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