[governance] FOURTH DRAFT statement on enhanced cooperation

[William Drake]

Hello,

A late intervention due to travels offline:

On Nov 10, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Fearghas McKay wrote:

> 
> On 10 Nov 2010, at 00:06, Avri Doria wrote:
> 
>> I think your way of describing might be a bit prejudicial.
>> I support the 'do no harm while supporting the existing efforts' clause as defined by McTim.
> 
> +1 to the points above.
> 
> However it should be be there as an option.

I agree that the existing efforts should be supported/encouraged and certainly cannot be characterized as "do nothing."  To reflect the diversity of views in the caucus and have a connection to the realities on the ground, l world think McTim's line needs to be included.  Perhaps we could square the circle by conditioning it a little, i.e. ""making no institutional changes UNLESS THERE IS AGREEMENT ON THE NEED TO DO SO but encouraging organisations to enhance their own cooperation with other stakeholders and to report to the CSTD on their progress."  Alternatively, we could decouple the issues entirely, and just have "Encouraging organisations to enhance their own cooperation with other stakeholders and to report to the CSTD on their progress" stand as an implicit alternative to making no institutional changes.

On a related matter, I am quite uncomfortable with  "a new umbrella governance institution for Internet policy development."   The notion of an "umbrella" body with authority over global policy development seems wholly disconnected from the realities of the distributed institutional architecture of global IG.  The verbal imagery conjures up an arrangement in which all the various governance actors and processes somehow feed up into and are overseen by some sort of über alles entity, presumably the sort of UN-based Council of high priests that the IGC rejected back in the WGIG days.  There's a pretty broad array of questions that would have to be worked through on this, starting with to what exactly would this be a solution—is a lack of UN top down coordination and control really the main problem from a global public interest standpoint?  Mechanisms that promote info/knowledge aggregation/analysis/sharing & dialogue——observatories, light working groups, the IGF itself—on a holistic, cross-cutting basis make sense to me, but proposing new hierarchies of supreme authority that have already rightly been rejected does not.

Rather than fixing on one (IMO archaic) model, why not a more open sentence like, "establishing new governance arrangements designed to address any pressing public policy matters that cannot be managed through existing institutions, with space for…"

Best,

Bill


***********************************************************
William J. Drake
Senior Associate
Centre for International Governance
Graduate Institute of International and
 Development Studies
Geneva, Switzerland
william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch
www.williamdrake.org
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