Multistakeholderism or Elitism? The Creation of a Transnational Field of Internet Governance

Abstract

Internet governance is representative of new forms of governance beyond state-to-state diplomacy. As other highly specialised issues in the global political economy, Internet governance is semi-privatised -it includes both state and non-state actors; and transnational, where space is reconfigured through processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. Several concepts have been used to qualify this type of governance, with multistakeholderism being the most common and most widely accepted among Internet governance scholars. It will be argued here that multistakeholderism fails to acknowledge important aspects of this type of governance and that the history of the emergence of Internet governance tends to hint towards other ways of describing the phenomena. While multistakeholderism tends to describe some form of equality among the different actors of a process, the notion of elitism stresses the power asymmetries that exist within a domain of governance. The paper tries to elaborate a theoretical framework that allows to better analyse the differentiated participation of the various stakeholders. It draws upon critical approaches to international Relations and political sociology to reconstruct the emergence of Internet governance as a global policy issue in the 1990s in order to get a historical perspective on the current debates on multistakeholderism and participation issues.