[governance] Fulfilling the Mandate of the IGF

[Jeremy Malcolm]

(I am late to this thread because I have been overseas for the last  
week or so without much Internet access.)

On 23/10/2007, at 9:33 AM, William Drake wrote:

> 38. The forum should not have a mandate to negotiate hard  
> instruments like treaties or contracts. However, in very  
> exceptional circumstances when the parties all agree that such  
> instruments are needed, there could be a mechanism that allows for  
> their establishment. Normally, the forum should focus on the  
> development of soft law instruments such as recommendations,  
> guidelines, declarations, etc.
>
> [NB: In retrospect, this seems a bit problematic in several  
> respects.  In any event, it implies an entirely different beast  
> from what we have, and a level of commitment to more than talk that  
> just isn’t there. The way the IGF is configured now, with no real  
> institutional apparatus or defined membership and just an annual  
> conference, it’s hard to see how it could devise even  
> recommendations, and how the effort to do so wouldn’t become WSIS  
> PrepCom Redux and eat up the entire conference while blotting out  
> opportunities for dialogue.

My take is that the reforms required are not as substantial as they  
may seem.  First, we need to make the forum more deliberative, which  
can be done (for example) by bringing back and devoting sufficient  
resources to the once-proposed Speed Dialogues (and establishing a  
parallel online process), and by institutionalising a mechanism by  
which for dynamic coalitions to deliver their recommendations  
(including background material) to the plenary body for further  
deliberation.  Second, we need a decision-making (ie. recommendation- 
making) organ with a defined membership, such as the bureau that some  
have proposed, which would take any consensus of the plenary body as  
its starting point, and develop a more formal expression of it on  
which the bureau can agree.  Chapter 6 of my thesis has much more  
detail on both of these suggested reforms and others.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm LLB (Hons) B Com
Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
host -t NAPTR 1.0.8.0.3.1.2.9.8.1.6.e164.org|awk -F! '{print $3}'


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