Internet Governance – Stakeholder vs. Democracy
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006The UN Internet Governance Forum is currently taking place in Athens with not far from 1,500 attendees registered for a room that can’t hold more than 800, to discuss four key topical issues of Openness (freedom of expression, flow of information, etc.), Security (trust), Diversity (multilingualism, local content) and Access (connectivity, policy and cost). Having attended the Nominet organised “The Road To Athens” meeting a few weeks ago, I was quite surprised as the openness of the organisers, Mr Nitin Desai in particular, to encouraging wide participation in the process.
Karl Auerbach in his blog makes reference to a paper he wrote which argues that stakeholderism is a ‘regressive idea’ in conflict with the principle of democracy adding that stakeholderism is about organisations rather than individual people having influence in the process. I think he has some point in that anything you put in the way has the potential to distort the interests of the stakeholders, but on the other hand is our political system any better?
Democracy is an imperfect system along with all others in politics, but it’s the best of a bad bunch which tries to achieve a result with everyone is represented fairly. With the national governments the population feels it is ‘important’ enough to get involved and vote, but looking at the elections run by Nominet for the Board of Directors and the Policy Advisory Board, the turnout is such that most members who can vote don’t. Many put this down to Nominet not doing enough, and whilst I’m no stranger to criticising Nominet where necessary, I think they have and continue to make an effort to engage the membership. Many stakeholders are busy and thus sometimes it is left to those who are not to elect individuals to represent them, so I’m not quite certain that a democratic solution is perfect. Democracy also encourages ‘politics’ to get elected in the first place, which is not about representing the electorate, but persuading them you will represent them. I think in Nominet’s case, the election of half of the members of the PAB has resulted in a group of people overall who will bring on board a wide range of views. There are very few groups which are as diverse in their views and interests as the PAB. I believe this makes it a very strong forum as compared to other systems which restrict choices to nominating committees, etc.
I think the way in which a stakeholder model (and I mean from an ‘organisational’ point of view) works depends heavily on the values the individuals involved share and to what extent they can distance their own personal beliefs, agendas and ulterior motives from trying to consider the bigger picture.
The concept of a ’stakeholder’ is not in my view exclusive of the concept of democracy, but it is the implementation of the structure of a mechanism which takes these into consideration that may at times suffer from. A ’stakeholder’ is someone who holds a stake in the outcome of a decision or policy, someone who is affected by it. This may, but need not be, financial. I suspect the mistake often made is to appoint an organisation to ‘represent’ a particular stakeholder group who is not in a position to do so. I suspect for example ‘intellectual property’ interests can be better represented by an individual than ‘the consumer’ which is a wider ranging group with disparate beliefs.
Taking the democracy principle further, it could be argued that all democratic governments would be suitable to represent their entire nation within a forum such as the IGF. With due respect to politicians and their hard word on our behalf, I would prefer to have wider input in such an important process. It is also not possible to exercise micro-democracy on every decision. If the population of a particularly country is growing at a phenomenal amount, does that mean they should dictate how the Internet works because they have many individuals? I think the answer is no, in the same way the Internet should not be run by the U.S. Government either. What is needed is a middle ground which takes into consideration all the viewpoints, and that is what a stakeholder approach attempts to do.
We also need to recognise that particular stakeholders may have more of a stake than others depending on the policy in question. If we are examining Internationalised Domain Names (domains with accents, or characters from Japanese, Chinese or Arabic languages for example) then the IDN users are a very significant stakeholder group, whilst their significance to the location of root servers is far less relevant (although the same people as a regional group may well have a strong stake in that debate). We need to accept the concept of dynamic stakeholder groups which may vary across time and on different issues. This concept is something I think the IGF has understood from the reference on BBC News from Nitin Desai where he makes reference to dialogue and formation of “coalitions of the willing” rather than a decision making meeting.
As with democracy, stakeholder theory is imperfect both in principle and implementation, but it is not ready to be dropped quite yet. What we need to recognise, which I believe is Karl’s fundemental concern, is that this should be an inclusive rather than an exclusive approach, and this needs to be on a level field rather than giving exclusivity or premium status to particular organisations, especially on a general level.
We have already seen with the IGF a wide ranging range of views on the igf2006.info site, recognising that interests are not limited to the people at the event in Athens in person. This is the beginning of something very interesting. It would be very refreshing to see the United Nations adopt the IGF model of encouraging wider participation more in every type of forum it hosts. The Internet is not a technical development, but a social one, and it will change the world of representation within every level of politics and governance.
