Multistakeholder Governance in the Public Interest
Multistakeholder Governance in the Public Interest
Responses - Stakeholder Civil Society
Annette Mühlberg, ver.di
Abstract
Far too often, governments shy away from their responsibility to ensure equal footing for all participants in the multi-stakeholder model to avoid the dominance of few well-funded organisations and lobbyists.
Multistakeholder Governance in the Public Interest
Multistakeholderism is the right solution in view of the extremely complex circumstances. Shaping a global information and communications infrastructure in the interest of the common good is a true challenge and raises numerous public policy issues – technically, legally and socially. To cover all interdisciplinary aspects and truly serve the public interest, the multistakeholder approach is a very useful tool – both for fact-finding and for decision making processes (as demonstrated by the global discussion fora of the Internet Governance Forum, IGF, or by globally acting organizations such as the Internet Corpo- ration for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN).
Governments should not be afraid of these procedures. On the contrary, far too often – and due to a lack of knowledge and money – they depend on company lobbyists who run their own agenda by giving advice on public policy making and “helping” governments to write laws. On a national basis, governments can make use of the advice of multistakeholder fora. On a cross-border level, as Bertrand de La Chapelle points out, multistakeholder governance is a way to achieve interoperability not only in technical architectures, but also between the cultures of different regions and the heterogeneous governance frameworks of state constitutions, articles of incorporation and charters for corporations, as well as between bylaws and statutes for NGOs.
Governments have an important role to play in making sure that the multistakeholder processes serve the public interest and are not imbalanced, i.e. that they do not give too much power to those who have the money and happen to be able to speak and write English (as it is still the case in ICANN). The principle of equal footing needs active implementation. Civil society works on a volunteer basis and therefore depends heavily on well-structured and transparent proce- dures. It also requires funding for those who cannot afford costly meetings, especially in an international framework.
The tensions and challenges created by a technically borderless Internet in a world of bordered nations are enormous. Because of the normative character of technical standards and procedures, their creation by only a few global players has tremendous effects on the social, ethical and legal standards of all regions of the world. There is thus a clear need for the development of global guiding principles with respect to the technological architecture and the legal framework of the Internet – based on a type of interdisciplinary technology assessment. The effectiveness of multistakeholder governance, in terms of defining the important issues at stake and developing principles and public policy strategies, was demonstrated at the World Summit on the Internet (WSIS) and at the following IGFs. And it is there that the important task of “translating” the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) for use in an information age began. It is essential that this continue, on global, regional and national levels.
The collaborative multistakeholder spirit is spreading with Internet Governance Fora taking place in all regions of the world. National IGFs provide input on policy making at regional and global levels. And governments, too, create multistakeholder fora, an example of which is the Internet Enquête Commission of the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag). Half of the members of this forum are politicians from all parliamentary parties, with the other half consisting of Internet experts from civil society, the technical community and the private sector. But even in these multistakeholder for a, the principle of equal footing has to be enforced anew every day. IT-Lobbyists are strong, and everyone knows that those who have money have power – if only to employ a large number of people to write extensive policy recommendations destined for the political circuit.
