[governance] IGF improvements: Forwards or Backwards?

Sun Oct 30 06:44:55 EDT 2011

Hi everybody

I will give my specific and detailed analysis of the Indian proposal a little bit later but for now it seems to be that it is important to clarify what the final objective is when we enter into a new round of interlinked and interrelated global discussion and negotiations and meet next week for the IGF Improvement WG CSTD meeting in Geneva. 

Do we want to move towards an improved multistakeholder PROCESS or do we plan to build a new multigovernmental STRUCTURE.  

The debate about multilateralism vs. multistakeholderism in Nairobi was very enlightening. My argument was that the multilateral intergovernmental treaty system will be more and more embedded into a multistakeholder environment where the interactive dialog among the stakeholders leads to a common understanding which can produce a (multistakeholder) "Framework of Commitments" instead of a (intergovermental) "Framework Convention". 

The question for the future of the IGF is whether it will provide a space also for governments to give their input into a multistakeholder process or whether the IGF itself should become a place which produces input into an intergovernmental process. 

If the role of the IGF would be reduced to give input into an intergovernmental body we would be back in 2002 when the WSIS started with exactly the same structure. We had an "Intergovernmental WSIS Bureau" and two "Non-governmental Stakeholder WSIS Bureaus" which were invited to give "input" into the intergovernmental negotiations. 

The result is known. When the "Civil Society WSIS Bureau" gave 96 recommendations to the 1st draft tabled by the "Intergovernmental WSIS Bureau" in September 2003, only three Civil Society proposals were reflected in the 2nd draft of the intergovernmental declaration in October 2003. When CS protested and labeled the governmental behaviour as "ignorant" and "arrogant", WSIS president Sammassekou, who told civil society in early September 2003 that we should move from "input" to "impcat" and from "turmoil" to "trust" in the relationship between governments and civil society, maneuvered and explained to the WSIS Civil Society Bureau that this is the nature of the intergovernmental process. Nobody would get everything. 

However, the feeling of "ignorance" of civil society input into an intergovernmental process could not be wished away. This pushed civil society into a position to consider to leave the whole WSIS and to organize an alternative process. I remember the meeting with the Swiss President where he tried to convince civil society that it would make sense to "stay within the process" and not to march through the streets of Geneva. He signaled understanding for the frustration of the civil society and refered to the fact that such an innovation in global policy making as the multistakeholder approach would need some times for all stakeholders to get a better understanding what this means in reality. I remember also the press conference in Geneva in October 2003 with hundreds of journalists who wanted to see the walk our of civil society and the collapse of WSIS. 

The "alternative process" which was finally accepted by the 500+ civil society organisations after several night sessions was to stay  and to organize the alternative "WITHIN" the WSIS process. The result was the "Civil Society WSIS Declaration" which was handed over to the President of the WSIS (intergovernmental) summit. The comments in December 2003 were that the intergovernmental document formulated what "could be done" while the CS Declaration said what "should be done". It is worth to re-read the civil society Geneva Declaration from December 2003. 

As an outcome of this "parallel process" the WGIG, which was established after the Geneva Summit as a truly multistakeholder body where governmental and non-governmental members had the same speaking and drafting rights. WGIG produced the "Internet Governance  definition" where it linked the stakeholders into a common process with no stakeholder in the "leadership position" ("shared decison making procedures" and "respective roles".) This definition was adopted by the heads of states of 160+ governments, including the governments of Brazil, India, China and Russia. 

To go back to 2002 for an IGF, which is now confronted with the challenges of the year 2020, would be the wrong u-turn. I hope that the civil society members of the IGF working group will remember history, can make this clear to governments and other members of the group and come with better "improvement proposals" into the meeting next Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday. 

Wolfgang

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Von: governance at lists.cpsr.org im Auftrag von William Drake
Gesendet: So 30.10.2011 10:16
An: Marilia Maciel
Cc: Governance List
Betreff: [governance] Indian proposal => "IGF improvements"

Hi Marilia 

Since you and our other reps will soon be in Geneva for the WGIGF meeting, it seems timely to circle back to this thread.

On Oct 21, 2011, at 4:18 PM, Marilia Maciel wrote:

	I would like to focus on what Bill has mentioned. I believe it is a very important topic, given the fact that we are close to the CSTD WG meeting and "outcomes" will be an important topic:

		This is a barrier I wish we could somehow overcome.  As long as developing country intergovernmental efforts on EC and in the ITU appear to have intergovernmental control as their end game and the IGF is getting tactically linked to this as you noted, one imagines the TC, business, and a lot of governments will remain wedded to the fear that an IGF that does more than meet and chat once a year would necessarily get leveraged to advance that agenda.  And CS proponents of more intensive, structured and "outcome" oriented dialogues will remain isolated and frustrated.  If intergovernmental control could be taken off the table, at least outside the ITU, that might help to make "IGF improvements" a less divisive topic.  

	I think we should separate the two topics, IGF improvements and enhanced cooperation. They are related, but they are different topics. And I personally think that a more outcome oriented IGF would be beneficial with our without the implementation of enhanced cooperation.

I wish it were otherwise, but they have been very closely related since CS first started advocating an IGF in 2004 and will be more so going forward. We were told by several people here that nobody should be concerned about the Rio proposal because it was just a draft and of course the 3 governments would be fully taking on board the opposition voiced by virtually everyone who spoke to it in the Nairobi CIR session.   I therefore asked why the Tshwane Declaration didn't just come out and take the UN oversight body concept off the table if that was true.  Now we have the answer-it wasn't.  

Irrespective of any stakeholder views, the Indian government has ploughed ahead and formally proposed almost precisely what the "just a draft" said (actually it's worse-the Indian language adds to the list of functions, "Facilitate negotiation of treaties, conventions and agreements on Internet-related public policies"...this to be done by 50 governments that meets for two weeks a year for ten six hour days).  And they did this in a purely intergovernmental setting where stakeholder views are duly ignored.  One might add that I asked the indian representative twice on stage whether/when a proposal might go to the GA and got evasive answers.  Since this was done a couple weeks after Nairobi, one has to assume that they'd already decided and just weren't going to say it in a multistakeholder setting where people might raise questions, which strikes me as rather indicative of how we can expect all this to be handled going forward.

So now we have been allowed to see the Indian proposal, and it says inter alia that "An improved and strengthened lGF that can serve as a purposeful body for policy consultations and provide meaningful policy inputs to the CIRP, will ensure a stronger and more effective complementarity between the CIRP and the IGF."   So let's no longer pretend that the two issues can be viewed separately.  The Indian proposal for IGF improvements that you and some others have championed here has been directly linked to the establishment of a UN body for enhanced cooperation by the Indian government.   To me this is a pity, because the former does have some good ideas that if decoupled from an intergovernmental end game on EC would have made the IGF more useful and closer to what some of us hoped for back in 2004.  But the linkage has been spelled out, and I strongly suspect the Indian IGF improvement proposals are now dead on arrival.  Why would all the actors that oppose intergovernmental control support IGF proposals that are designed to enable IGF to feed into an intergovernmental control mechanism?  India has given away the game that these actors always insisted was really being played behind the scenes.

We are probably now in for an unproductive WGIGF process.  I suspect that for the next half year we'll be getting frustrated emails from you and our other reps about how the TC, business, and non-G77/China governments are blocking this or that proposal for more structured dialogues, working groups, outputs, etc.  It is unclear that CS will be able to articulate some sort of third way that would make the IGF more than an annual chat fest without this being viewed as part of a larger and more important battle, especially when some of our representatives are closely identified with the intergovernmental agenda.  At the moment i'm not too hopeful, but would be interested to hear discussion of ways in which this could be done.

Cheers,

Bill

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