[discuss] Supporting National-Level Multistakeholder Cooperation

[William Drake]

Hi

A number of people have suggested that subject lines should be updated to reflect actual contents, and I’d like to reply on something unrelated from the "Snowden Revelations” thread.

On Jan 16, 2014, at 9:34 AM, Adiel Akplogan <adiel at afrinic.net> wrote:

> few of us as well have been saying this on this and others as well. Instead of spending our time trying to reinvent every wheal, we will do ourself good by focussing on how we can create (or improve) the link between global coordination/governance and local stakeholders including Policy makers and Governments in order to increase mutual trust and confidence. The future of all of this depend on our ability to calmly, candidly  and diligently address that.

I think one the more positive steps that could be taken further to the SP conference and related initiatives would be to provide some sort of momentum and support for the development of multistakeholder processes at the national level.  It’s very difficult to have functionally effective and politically sustainable multistakeholder processes at the global level if countries’ interfaces to those processes are largely or even solely the province of ministries of communications or foreign affairs that are used to only working with xyz conceptual frameworks, missions, domestic constituencies, intergovernmental organizations, etc.  The involvement of other government ministries would be helpful, and the involvement of civil society, technical community and private sector constituencies is essential.   One has to wonder how many of the truly bad ideas of recent years would have been pushed if there had been more broad-based national processes and checks and balances.  This is arguably true for all countries to varying degrees, but it’s especially an issue where the relevant players are less empowered and organized, and lack effective access to policy processes.  There of course various initiatives by global partners to provide support and connections to particular stakeholders, but more is needed, as is support regarding institutional frameworks.  In many other global issue areas there’s extensive sharing of knowledge, good practices, model laws and all that, but when it comes to helping interested countries think through the costs/benefits and options for designing multistakeholder processes, what do we have for reference?  Do we just buy everyone plane tickets to Brazil and say go talk to CGI.br and see what they’re up to?  There must be more.  When WTO members negotiated the basic telecom agreement including the Reference Paper calling for independent regulatory authorities, there was a big spurt in efforts to lay out models and share experiences on these.  It may be worth considering whether and how something similar could be done with regard to national multistakeholder processes for Internet governance….

Cheers

Bill

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William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com (lists),
  www.williamdrake.org
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