[governance] Informal meeting with USG

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 29/09/2011, at 11:36 AM, Izumi AIZU wrote:

> We are contacted by the delegation of the US government if we can
> have some small and informal meeting here today during lunch,
> just 1 hour, late yesterday.


I blogged about the outcome here:

http://igfwatch.org/discussion-board/secret-civil-society-business

A few paragraphs excerpted from that post:

"We were all agreed on the success of the IGF as a discussion forum, but the civil society representatives contended that improvements to improve the forum's output orientation were needed. The Indian proposal provided one possible template for doing this, generating a range of specific policy options that could be presented to policy makers, as WGIG developed policy options for presentation to the second phase of WSIS. 

The US delegates, however, feared that such improvements would result in turning the forum into an intergovernmental-style negotiation. Whilst, by definition, governments have no problem with intergovernmental-style negotiation, they contend that this would destroy the IGF as we know it. ...

As I pointed out at the meeting, we could easily try it as an experiment for one year, and then abandon it if it didn't work. ... My colleagues spoke to similar effect, reminding us that multi-stakeholderism, and the IGF as a body based on this principle, are still young and that we should not be afraid to take measured risks and experiment until we find the ideal formula - one with a little more output orientation, but stopping short of intergovernmental-style negotiation. 

... More frankly, the biggest fear that underlies the objection to negotiations is not that it will damage the IGF, but (and this is an exact quote) that "governments can only cede negotiating authority up to a certain point." In fact for both governments and the private sector, the question is the same... how much of their power are they really willing to share? 

Another topic of discussion was this year's "principle tsunami" (to borrow Wolfgang's phrase, and with apologies to Izumi), with governmental frameworks of principles on Internet governance having been put forward by the G8, OECD, EU, US, Brazil, Council of Europe and more. Wolfgang's vision is that civil society should develop its own similar statement of principles, and that we should then discuss it and the other statements within the IGF, working towards developing them into a common framework of commitments that can be agreed by all stakeholders, before the conclusion of the IGF's next mandate term. 

As far as the US delegates would move during our discussion was to consider that perhaps the IGF meetings should have a particular theme around which its discussions could be focussed each year, and that main sessions and workshops could somehow develop and map policy options with respect to that theme. But they did also undertake to take all our comments on board."

-- 
Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Project Coordinator
Consumers International
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