[governance] some notes on the CSTD inter-sessional on 17th Dec

[parminder]

Hi

A happy new year to all!

Since much has been lamented about what came out of the CSTD 
inter-sessional, let me start my notes by trying to give it a positive 
spin.

My impression is that something very remarkable and perhaps 
unprecedented happened on the 17th in the CSTD inter-sessional meeting 
which is an important step forward in global governance (I have some 
misgivings too about 'this step' forward which I will discuss in another 
email). I may be wrong and those more well versed with UN system may 
correct me, but this may be the very first time that a 'substantive' UN  
body,  with  political  membership  and status and not just  an  expert  
group,  will have  some specified non-gov permanent  'invited  
participants'  who  'will remain engaged through-out the process'. 
Importantly, these participants are not just 'outside experts' but 
'representatives' of groups other than states.

To the extent that I think this is a big step, in the end, in some ways 
it may even be better that the WG group is not a Chair's WG, which would 
have meant an 'experts group' only giving advise which does not 
constitute a substantive UN body's report, but it is actually a CSTD WG, 
and thus based on political representation and not expertise alone. ( I 
may be reading too much into this, and would be happy for a discussion 
on this issue.)

In any case, our (my organisation's) initial position was a WGIG kind of 
a group. (The WGIG model for the new WG on IGF improvements, 
incidentally, was opposed by many business and technical community 
members at Vilnius.) I have been a great fan of WGIG model and have 
suggested a few times that MAG should rather try to work more in that 
model than its typical abdicating mode when faced with substantive 
issues, which alone can make the IGF more productive. However there has 
been little engagement from the IGC to forward such a model within the 
IGF system. Anyway, this is just to affirm my support for the WGIG model.

Much of the contestation during ther CSTD meeting, whose real substance 
and motives perhaps lie elsewhere, took place around whether the 
proposed WG was a Chair's WG or a CSTD WG. The former could be formed 
more or less in whichever manner the Chair decides, and would be an 
expert group advising the CSTD, after which the commission could decide 
to do what it liked in its substantive communication to ECOSOC and GA. A 
CSTD WG on the other hand will be  a political body with membership 
based on political status. The text of the UN GA resolution indeed had 
some amount of ambiguity about it being a experts group or an 
substantive CSTD WG.

    18. Welcomes the decision by the Economic and Social Council in
    paragraph 30 of its resolution 2010/2 to invite the Chair of the
    Commission on Science and Technology for Development to establish,
    in an open and inclusive manner, a working group which would seek,
    compile and review inputs from all Member States and all other
    stakeholders on improvements to the Internet  Governance Forum, in
    line with the mandate set out in the Tunis Agenda,4 and which would
    submit a report to the Commission at its fourteenth session, in
    2011, with recommendations, as appropriate, that would constitute an
    input by the Commission to the General Assembly, through the
    Economic and Social Council;

While it was the Chair who was invited to form a WG (which could be a 
Chair's WG or as well be a CSTD WG), the last part of the above para is 
significant in saying that the report of the WG will 'constitute an 
input by the Commission to the General Assembly, through the Economic 
and Social Council'. To me,  it really does look very unlikely that an 
expert group assembled by the chair could give a report which will be 
considered 'an input *by *the commission to the GA'.

While I was still rooting for a WGIG model during the meeting, I could 
see that the developing countries group was clear - they were no way 
going to shift from their conviction that it was to be a CSTD WG. (Sure, 
it served their political objective too for it to be a CSTD WG. I dont 
say they were not pressing their politics here as were other actors who 
were present.) This dev countries group pointed to the description 'CSTD 
WG' that has been mentioned in all documents regarding various meetings 
etc on this issue, apart from their interpretation of the text.

If it indeed was to be a substantive CSTD WG with political membership, 
their stand that non-gov participants cannot be equal and full members 
looked difficult to argue against (though I was still trying to argue 
that this is a very new context etc). That would be in violation of all 
rules and precedents, even perhaps of general political sensibilities.

So either this group agreed that it was a Chair's expert group, which I 
realized was not going to happen, or we tried to find  what best could 
be done within the CSTD WG formula. Within this formula there were two 
options being proposed at this point.

One was Egypt's proposal of multistakeholder task forces around specific 
sub-issues that would input their report/ recommendations to the WG 
proper which was to be inter-gov. Second was Brazil's proposal of each 
meeting of WG having speaker/ participants from stakeholder groups, 
leaving it to the stakeholders to decide the speakers/ participants. 
(This later proposal has the problem that only a continuous 
participation of the same non-gov participants throughout the WG's life 
is really meaningful.)

 To proceed from what looked like a Chair's WG versus CSTD WG stalemate, 
seeing that dev countries were not going to move from their 
understanding of it being a CSTD WG, I proposed a new formula to one of 
the most active developing country participant - that of permanent 
'invited participants' 'who will remain fully engaged throughout the 
process'. To me, this appeared the best we could get, and still a 
considerable step forward.

The mentioned dev country rep then suggested the text 'The Chair invites 
the following stakeholders to participate in the Working Group....' 
which is 'the' key part of the agreed document now. I directly suggested 
to the chair to add the part 'will remain fully engaged throughout the 
process' which she graciously did. I thought this statement can be used 
to assure a fair amount of space and rights within the WG. Later, a 
developed country rep, pursuing a similar line of thought, asked for 
inclusion of the word 'interactively' - as in 'interactively 
participate'. This was very useful. What we were trying here was to get 
some text in to try and guarantee that once the WG is set up, more 
excluding norms may not evolve by practise.

Pushing it further towards greater equality of status of non-gov 
participants, Anriette suggested  that the text be changed to 'chair 
invites to join' rather than participate. This text went up for a while 
but got removed later.

I think that overall it may not be too bad a deal we got. I would much 
prefer that we now move on to discussing what substantive changes or 
improvements we want to see in the IGF. If we get a good set of 5 people 
in, we can use the civil society's greater readiness to come up with new 
ideas, develop implementable details around them etc to make some really 
good impact.

We need to talk and collaborate with the business and technical 
community as we need to with gov reps for pushing what we want to see 
happen (and to figure that out is more important). However, developing 
any kind of grand alliance with a shrill anti dev country govs rhetoric  
may not be the best thing to do now. Yes, our interests are shared vis a 
vis greater openness of processes, and we will need to huddle together 
every time new efforts get made to demote the level of participation of 
nongov stakeholders in the WG processes. But that is a tactical thing we 
have always been doing. We may have known convergences in a few 
substantive areas - like our opposition to moving the IGF secretariat to 
NY and the desire for keeping it independent etc.... However, there are 
also a large number of divergences in key areas where the idea may be to 
make IGF as a more valuable institution to be able to really contribute 
to global IG related policies. These areas may be the more important 
ones to focus on in terms of real IGF improvements.

In this regard, apart from mentioning how the IGF should complement, and 
thus contribute to, the proposed process of enhanced cooperation which 
would directly deal with global Internet policy issues, the relevant 
part of the GA resolution also gives a significant pointer of the 
directions in which it would like to see improvements in the IGF .

"....... while recognizing at the same time the need to improve it 
(IGF), with a view to linking it to the broader dialogue on global 
Internet governance".

Parminder









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