[governance] multistakeholderism

[jefsey]

At 05:05 19/08/2010, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
>I haven't been participating in this discussion, because I don't 
>want to stick too much of an oar in while I'm co-coordinator, but 
>I've been avidly reading and there have been many pearls of wisdom 
>exchanged.  I'll just pipe up briefly here to add one short +1 to 
>this, and to make a couple of related remarks.

Interesting debate.  However, I do not want to harp on that too much, 
but democracy seems to be an outdated concept that is related to a 
period of prevalent dialogue calling for an elected chain of dialogue 
from bottom to top. With the demographic growth, and its implied 
direct horizontal relational consequences, we entered a polylogue 
period (people talking to everyone on behalf of everyone), and to 
facilitate this polylogue we created the Internet. This is new, and 
we are learning from experience as to what polycracy may mean and how 
one "governs", together with each other, a 7++ billion multicolor, 
multicultural, multilingual, multifaith, etc. States UN, in turn 
resulting from and dependent on a developing set of new technologies.

The WSIS offered a panel of different, and probably prophetic, insights:

- individual people centrism

- dynamic coalitions: everyone can join/quit them to promote/defend a position

- enhanced cooperations (to be worked on) to carry common tasks - 
where the current IESOCANN failure is, due to the still prevailing 
ICANN "Class IN" centrism make-believe. However, the enhanced 
cooperation mechanism is something that we will probably have to 
consider soon enough due to the principle of subsidiarity becoming 
the third founding principle (through the IDNA2008 illustration) of 
the Internet architecture (after the principle of adaptability as a 
result of the principle of permanent change - RFC 1958; and the 
principle of simplicity - RFC 3439).

- multistakeholderism. However, in mainly quoting the governance 
regalian space, civil society, private sector, and international 
bodies, they overlooked three key missing stakeholder classes: money, 
users, and adminance.

--- Adminance is what provides its technical soil to Governance 
(standards, operations, structures, training, maintenance, etc.).
--- Users are the people who are the center of the whole thing (far 
away from CS, which deals with principles, while Users deal with reality).
--- Money is still currently a decimal non-digital transaction memory 
tool that is devastated by the emergence of the digital ecosystem and 
is totally out of tune with it, and with the emerging polycracy 
(hence the current financial crisis and corruption wave [Russia: 50% 
of the GNP]).

- the IGF decision making tool. Certainly the least understood 
proposition to date. While the main concept is still "coordinated 
cooperation" (by US, ICANN, UN...), the IGF is NOT a place for 
coordination (with voted motions influenced by lobbies and sponsors), 
but rather a place for "concertation" (French/EU meaning), i.e. where 
everyone can come to a better, mutually informed, personal decision.

In such a system, stability can only proceed from what Buckminster 
Fuller called "tensegrity" (integrity based on a balance between 
tension and compression components).,This is probably a notion that 
we should explore better as a multilateral continuation of the 
East/West Cold War coexistence and further US globalization attempt.

jfc


>I agree that civil society must promote the adoption of a framework 
>for further democratising global governance (for which 
>"multistakeholderism" is just a convenient and slightly inaccurate 
>shorthand), beyond the Internet governance regime, in which it is 
>really just a test-bed.
>
>Agreeing with Wolfgang, and disagreeing slightly with Parminder, for 
>me the inclusion of the three stakeholder groups in 
>multi-stakeholder structures has never been about increasing the 
>power of the private sector, but on the contary, balancing it.  The 
>private sector already has the ear of governments, and by promoting 
>multistakeholderism we ask nothing more than for the same privilege.
>
>In Internet governance, we already have a good basic starting point 
>for such a framework in the WSIS process criteria and the IGF's 
>(unfulfilled) mandate to assess the performance of Internet 
>governance institutions against these criteria.  Beyond that, the 
>framework is being taken forward by efforts like the UNECE/CoE/APC 
>Code of Good Practice on information, participation and transparency 
>in Internet governance (already referred to in this thread, 
>http://www.intgovcode.org/).
>
>Other regimes are very far behind.  I have just written a paper in 
>which I argue for the development of global principles for 
>governance of the global regime on intellectual property, in view of 
>the threat of ACTA, whose negotiators not only flout basic 
>principles of democratic global governance, but also feign ignorance 
>that they are doing so.  One of our workshops (Parminder's) will 
>deal with this in detail too.
>
>My fear, though, is that whilst Internet governance is, as I've 
>said, just a test-bed for multistakeholderism, if it doesn't soon 
>prove its value then it will not only have been born there but will 
>die there as well, and end up with no more currency in global 
>governance discourse than communism or anarchism.
>
>In this respect I respectfully can't agree with Ginger (another 
>reason I'm piping up now!) about the need to constrain the IGF from 
>producing "results".  The fears about "the pressure of negotiations 
>or the need for an agreed-upon end 'result'", whilst not unfounded, 
>should be systematically confronted and addressed rather than 
>fatalistically accepted.
>
>It is more important that multi-stakeholderism works (and for us, 
>not just for the incumbent powers) rather than that it doesn't rock 
>the boat.  And by "works", we mean that we need to have an 
>appreciable impact on shaping actual public policy decisions at a 
>global level.  At the moment, we quite simply don't (research 
>presented at last year's workshop on "Identifying the Impact" 
>demonstrated this, and the UNSG's recent remarks also acknowledge it).
>
>In fact there are many ways in which the power of governments and 
>other powerful actors to screw up the process can be defused.  I've 
>written about these ad nauseum and I don't intend to do so again 
>here, but read again the summary I wrote for the IGP for a refresher 
>if you are interested (http://internetgovernance.org/pdf/MalcolmIGFReview.pdf).
>
>With that out of the way, I'll re-lurk and leave you all to continue 
>these very productive and interesting discussions.
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