[governance] IGF Leadership?

["Kleinwächter, Wolfgang"]

Milton:
 
One reason IGF is losing relevance, is that IGF's leadership seems to be utterly blind when it comes to distinguishing between issues where it can be entrepreneurial and fill gaps in the current institutional environment, and issues where it has no real capacity to contribute anything.

Wolfgang:
The problem is, that there is NO IGF leadership at the moment. The dilemma is that the two key individuals who steered IGF - Nitin and Markus - are gone, the MAG is in a limbo and the "overseeing body", the UN CSTD, is unable to find a consensus beyond the simple decision to continue until 2015. However, there is not only bad news. The opportunity is that a new bottom up emerging self-organized leadership could constitute itself during the forthcoming MAG meeting in May 2011 as a driving force which both understands the issues and has a vision what to do (step by step) in the coming years. A bottom up self organized successful IGF in Nairobi (this would be before the 2nd Committee of the UNGA will start negotiations on "IGF improvement") would demonstrate that there is no need to wait for CSTD/ECOSOC/UNGA recommendations to "improve" the IGF. The people themselves (the "stakeholders") will understand what they have to do and they will hopefully do it (without waiting for "permission").  
 
The general problem is that the multistakeholder approach was accepted by the heads of states in 2005 as a "theoretical" concept, but there was no common understanding what it means in practice. Five years later we still see more lip service than real implementation if ot comes to new forms of (global) policy development and decision making. Nobody really knows what the "respective roles" of the main stakeholders are and how the interaction among the stakeholders should be organized and implemented. What we need is indeed a set of (multistakeholder) guiding principles and formal procedures for stakeholder interaction. A good subject for an IGF workshop. A great challenge for a new "Framework of Commitments" (FoC). 
 
The risk is that the whole new MS approach could fail and could fall back into traditional intergovernmental powerplay with opposing non-governmental global mechanisms outside the (state) power structure. This is what you can see now within the G 8 under the French Presidency and the Russian efforts to get the issue into the 1st Committee of the UNGA, which deals with security issues (and where non-governmental stakeholders have nothing to say). 
 
As Thomas Schneider has recently put it nicely in a panel on multistakeholderism (during the IGF-D), there is not yet a real multistakeholder model in the world.  ICANN and IGF as the two main playgrounds for the new global governance model are still in their infant stage and do not really offer opportunities "on equal footing". ICANN has multistakeholder participation but it is under private sector leadership. IGF has multistakeholder participation but it is (as we can see now) under governmental (UN) leadership. We see the Board/GAC battle and we see the CSTD WG composition battle between governments and non-governmental stakeholder (with an deep dissens among the governments themselves in the background).  
 
But the good news here is that the "patt", this "inter-governmental  agony", offers a "window of opportunity" for the further development of the IGF and a new MAG which should move from "giving advice" to "steer the process". Such a new (open) IGF Multistakeholder Steering Group for an IGF 2.0 could become the first real model of an multistakeholder process which offers equal opportunities to each stakeholders. 
 
With other words, workshop proposers and MAGgers should think big. Nairobi is much more than another IGF. 
 
Wolfgang
 
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t