[governance] Invitation: WSIS Form workshop on governance

[William Drake]

Hello,

While I gather the level of meatspace participation by IGF types will be rather low next week in Geneva, all those who are making the trip would be most welcome to attend a workshop I've organized in the WSIS Forum.  There will be remote participation available as well through the forum site http://wsisforum2011.pathable.com/index.html (it seems you have register for this), a twitter feed, and so on.

The workshop will be held in the Governing Body Room (seems appropriate) of The International Labor Organization from 9:00-10:30 Tuesday 17 May 2011.  The idea is to contribute to the inchoate debate on what kinds of institutional structures would be most appropriate in tackling key global governance issues going forward.  For example, rather than just saying on political/normative grounds that we prefer multistakeholderism or intergovernmentalism, it would be useful to draw on the relevant analytical literatures and practical experiences to arrive at some principled bases for selecting institutional arrangements that are optimized to particular functional problems.  This would seem to be of particular relevance at a time when parties are proposing new or revised global governance arrangements on various fronts, e.g. enhanced cooperation, the IANA contract, the COE initiative on crossborder Internet harm, the governance of the Internet of Things, the debate on revising the International Telecom Regulations to cover the Internet, the development agenda discussion, current intellectual property and digital trade initiatives, even the DC on Rights and Principles initiative for that matter.  What models are best suited to which of these issue-sets?


Description follows:

Institutional Choice in Global Communications Governance

The contemporary global communications order is characterized by a significant increase in the number and variety of governance arrangements.  Traditional multilateralism has been supplemented by plurilateral, regional, and bilateral intergovernmentalism; and by unilateralism, co-regulation, industry self-governance, multistakeholder governance, and the coordinated convergence of independent practices.  These ordering mechanisms vary greatly in terms of the collective action problems they address and the institutional attributes they possess.

How do we conduct a principled evaluation of alternative models’ relative merits and potential “fit” with current and emerging governance challenges?  What are their respective strengths and weaknesses in terms of cross-cutting objectives like equity, efficiency, transparency, accountability, inclusiveness, development-friendliness, and public interest orientation?  Are there any generalizable lessons that they could learn from one another?  How well do today’s mechanisms cohere into an strong and effective global governance architecture?  This workshop will seek to advance the holistic assessment of these and related questions and to assess them in relation to key cases of contemporary ICT global governance.

Speakers

Dr. William J. Drake  [organizer & moderator]
International Fellow, Media Change & Innovation Division
Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research
University of Zurich, Switzerland

Ms. Anriette Esterhuysen
Executive Director, Association for Progressive Communications
South Africa

Mr. Alvaro Galvani
Head, Division of Information Society, Ministry of External Relations
Government of Brazil

Mr. Markus Kummer
Vice President of Public Policy, The Internet Society
Switzerland 

Prof. Michael Latzer
Chair, Media Change & Innovation Division
Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research
University of Zurich, Switzerland

Ms. Nermine El Saadany
Director of International Relations Division, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology
Government of Egypt

Mr. Thomas Schneider
Deputy Head of International Relations Service, Federal Office of Communications 
Government of Switzerland


We are hoping for a lively interactive discussion with no serial talking head presentations of pre-prepared speeches and ample time for interventions from the floor and remote.  So if this is of interest, please do join us.

I might add that this workshop is linked to a similarly constructed one I've proposed for Nairobi, although that one would have a somewhat different panel-line up and focus a bit more narrowly on global IG. http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=WSProposals2011View&wspid=178  It should be interesting and instructive to address roughly the same issues in the two different venues with two different audiences…

Best,

Bill


--Please note new email address--

***************************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow
Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
University of Zurich, Switzerland
william.drake at uzh.ch
www.williamdrake.org
****************************************************

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20110511/ecc1b1aa/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
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