[governance] Montreux

Sat Feb 26 15:48:01 EST 2011

Wolfgang, thanks for the report.

In relation to outcomes you mention in 3. below, 
was the Chair's summary mentioned?

I also liked Brazil's suggestion during the open 
consultation on Wednesday to try and develop 
principles from discussions at the IGF, not as 
something to be produced as a specific outcome of 
each meeting, but develop/emerge overtime .

Adam

>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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