[governance] multistakeholderism

Thu Aug 19 11:28:13 EDT 2010

Jefsey,

While your note below seems to be making some useful points it demonstrates
to my mind precisely one of the major hesitations I have concerning shifting
away from existing approaches to democracy/the governance of governance into
any of the alternatives currently being discussed in forums such as this
one, especially where the main argument is that somehow the technology is
forcing these changes upon us.

We are having a discussion on quite fundamental issues of very broad
significance and relevance and in the midst of this we are bombarded with
technical jargon, references to highly specialized and even arcane areas of
expertise and documentation, and undefined acronyms and neologisms and we
are expected that somehow we are to take this seriously as arguments of more
general import. (Or what would be even worse, nod sagely as though we
understood and passed these along as useful contributions.)

If you can translate what you have below into any of the official languages
of the UN it would I think be a useful place to begin.

Tks,

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: jefsey [mailto:jefsey at jefsey.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 12:57 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Jeremy Malcolm; governance at lists.cpsr.org;
Michael Gurstein
Subject: Re: [governance] multistakeholderism

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democracy seems to be an outdated concept that is related to a period of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>
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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