[governance] Montreux

Sat Feb 26 14:19:27 EST 2011

Hi everybody

here are some observations from the IGF Improvement meeting in Montreux.

1. The first and most important point is that nobody challenged the participation of civil society and other non-governmental stakeholders as equals in the discussion and in the future drafting of the final report. After the two December meetings of the UNCSTD this was not so obviously expected. Even the government of Iran said that it values the contribution of non-governmental stakeholders in the process since 2003. There was no hostile climate. In contrary, contributions from all five CS reps in the WG were taken as very helpful and reasonable input. 

2. A lot of time was wasted with the discussion on procedureal issues. The discussion on substantial issues circeled for hours around the questions of the "linkage" of the IGF. India, Egypt but also Brazil used the languge of the UNGA resolution which says that the IGF should be linked to the "broader dialogue on Internet Governance". Some pepole in the room had the impression that this is not a good language because the broadest dialogue is the IGF itself. And there was some mistrust that this could become a formula to put the IGF under the "enhanced cooperation" discussion in the UNGA. Alternative proposed language was to link the IGF to "other dialogues" but India and Egypt insisted in the "accepted language" which, BTW, was introduced by the US government during the negotiations in the 2nd Committee of the UNGA in New York in November 2010. However both Egypt and India accepted an interpretiaton that one of the functions of the IGF is to bring information to other dialogues and that this formulation (in the headline of Chapter 2 of the forthcoming report) will not include any formal sub-ordination of the IGF under "another dialogue". My comment here is that it is rather obvious that on the one hand IGF and EC are two different processes which are not formally interlinked but there are some trade offs on the other hand. The IBSA was not discussed in detail. This will remain an open question. Russia proposed again to link the IGF with the WSIS Forum but produced protest against any form of "merger". In a second interventon Russia clarified that they did not propose "merger" but wanted to use "synergies" to avoid the waste of resources. There was no support for a closer linkage between the two fora.   

3. The debate about outcome did not create any new ideas. There was a broad consensus that the IGF should not become a "negotiation body", should not produce any "negotiated language" or "binding recommendations", but should produce something which people can take home and read within "ten minutes" and show their constituencies as "outcome". My impression was that more and more stakeholders, including governments, can live with "messages".  The proposed procedure to generate the messages was not discussed in detail but the proposal to have nominated rapporteurs for each workshop and plenary who have to produce one to three "short messages" from the discussion was seen as a reasonable approach. This would guaratee that there is a distributed system of messages production which would reduce the risk of capture of the drafting by one single group. 50 workshops would mean 50 - 150 messages from 50 rapporteurs. 

4. Another key issues was the role and function of the MAG. The idea to have the MAG (or the secretariat) like a bureau was mentioned but got no suprport. The majority was in favour of a more open MAG, more open consultations and a right mixture between continuation and rotation in the membership. A related question was the financing of the secretariat. India and Egypt called for a stable public funding (to become independen from voluntary contributions) but they did not say where the money should come from. 

5. The broader involvement of developing countries was discussed at length. There was a broad consensus among all participants that the participation of developing countries - both governments and non-govenrmental stakeholders - has to be broadend. There was an outspoken wish to strengthen in particular civil society organisations and small and medium enterprises in developing countries and to enable them to participate more actively in IGF activities.

6. There was a clear support for a stronger linkage between the global IGF and national and regional IGFs. On the other hand, dynamic coalitions were not really discussed. There was a proposal to have in between the global IGFs also "thematic IGFs" but also here no concrete step was planned. 

7. The meeting decided not to go into the details of how to organize workshops, plenaries, feeder workshops etc. Some proposals were made how to improve the planning and the linkage between the various sessions within an IGF, but this has to be further discussed.

8. The only thing (but this is not bad) the group could agree after two days is the structure of the planned report to the UNCSTD meeting in May 2011. There is now an informal drafting group which will work together with the Secretariat to draft the report for the next meeting, scheduled for March 24/25, 2011 in Geneva. 

I want to thank all friends of the IGC and the civil society for their input. CS played and active and recognized role and made very valuable contributions to the process. At the end Anriette, Parminder and other raised even the issue to increase the number of CS people in the various forthcoming groups because CS is different from the other non-governmentwl stakeholders (broader, more diverse etc.). Nobody really objetced this but there was no time left for a discussion, Lets wait and see where we will go from here. 

Best wishes

wolfgang
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