[governance] Re: Who is Civil Society?

[Daniel Pimienta]

>Multistakeholder governance? Sorry, it makes no sense to me, and is 
>greatly open to manipulation and domination by the powerful.

I am afraid that the relativism which has been promoted in many 
previous mails in defining civil society conduces logically and 
inevitably to Ian's sad conclusion.

I may have a defectuous memory but it seems to me that in the WSIS 
process things were much more clear as the definitions were 
institutionals and not personals.
Civil society is who belongs (exclusively) to a civil society 
organization (CSO).

Nothing prevents you to belong at the same time to a government, a 
business organization and a CSO; however in case of multiple 
appartenances some basic and prudent logics provide some order:
- if you belong a government, then you are classfied "government" 
even if you belong to any one of the two other categories (and you 
should be very careful not to be involved in decisions which impact 
the company you belongs to);
- if you belong to a business entity you are classified a stakeholder 
from private sector even if you belong also to a CSO.
- then to be classified a civil society stakeholder you need 1) to 
belong to a recognized CSO and 2) not to belong to another stakeholder group.

Note 1: academy can be classified as a categorie of CSO or have its 
own group with the same logic (except that there is no preemption to 
be both academy and CSO).
Note 2: if you are a free spirit who does not belong to government or 
private sectors, and want to be a voice of civil society, then join a 
CSO as a member or create your own CSO.

This definition does not solve perfectly the issues of conflicts of 
interests and domination by the powers (no one does) but it does 
reduce considerably the areas of ambiguities and may allow a more 
meaningful gouvernance.


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