[governance] COMMENTS SOUGHT: draft letter to ISOC on selection of T&A nominees for CSTD WG on EC

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 17/03/2013, at 9:02 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:

> In addition, we need to evaluate whether the way that the world is
> changing is acceptable, and if that is not the case, we must advocate
> for a change of course. But even in that case, pretending that the
> developments since Tunis are somehow irrelevant is not a via viable
> path forward.


I think we abandon the touchstone of Tunis at our peril.  Sure, the world has moved on since then - there is no way on God's green earth that we would get as good of an outcome now (not that it was that good to begin with).  So we should be very careful to allow Tunis to be put up for grabs now (and certainly not by the chance wording of a public servant who knows less about the topic than we do).  We have precious little enough to use to hold the UN accountable, and I would rather not play fast and loose with what we do have.  For one thing, the enhanced cooperation process hangs on a very thin thread.  Neither am I going to allow "oh, we have moved on since Tunis" to be used as an excuse for detracting from the full effect of the IGF's mandate.

Having said that, by all means we can suggest improvements for WSIS+10, which could include a re-examination of the IGF's mandate and of the stakeholder groupings.  For me though, the latter is very clear.  Governments are a stakeholder group because they provide formal legitimacy.  The private sector is a stakeholder group because they represent the value of markets.  Civil society is a stakeholder because its role is to represent all viewpoints that the state and markets don't.  The value of the cross-cutting technical and academic communities is more instrumental - their inputs have value, but they are not conceptually as intrinsic to the constitution of a global democratic polity as the other three groups, whose involvement is indispensable.

-- 
Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Policy Officer
Consumers International | the global campaigning voice for consumers
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