What is civil society and who represents civil society at the IGF? An analysis of civil society typologies in internet governance

Trisha Meyer,Jamal Shahin,Nadia Tjahja

doi:10.1016/j.telpol.2021.102141

Abstract

For 15 years, the UN-mandated Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has brought different stakeholder groups together to engage in debate and discussion on public policy issues relevant to Internet Governance, but who are the ‘civil society’ that is treated as one of the cornerstones of the IGF? This paper aims to provide two contributions to discussions on norm entrepreneurship in internet governance. First, it aims to contribute to the growing body of literature on multistakeholderism, notably by furthering debates on the role of civil society in institutions of global governance (in this instance, the IGF). Second, we aim to contribute to the debates on the future of the IGF(+), by digging into the civil society stakeholder group to try to understand who is actually present in the discussions. By creating a typology of the 2830 Civil Society Organisations that have participated in IGFs between 2006 and 2019, we provide nuance to the heterogeneity of civil society in Internet Governance debates. This exploratory study has shown that there is a hidden wealth available in the statistics of the IGF that can inform our policymaking capacity in terms of topics, representation but also providing access and ensuring outreach to specific communities.

Highlights

For 15 years, the UN-mandated Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has brought different stake holder groups together to engage in debate and discussion on public policy issues relevant to Internet Governance, but who are the ‘civil society’ that is treated as one of the cornerstones of the IGF? This paper aims to provide two contributions to discussions on norm entrepreneurship in internet governance
From these 14,079 participants, we narrowed down our field of analysis to organisations, as our analysis in this paper focuses on civil society organisations (CSOs) representation at the IGFs
This paper set out to identify what types of CSO participate in IGFs in order to assess how ‘civil society’ as a category of stakeholder in the IG ecosystem can contribute to the governance of the Internet

Summary

Introduction

For 15 years, the UN-mandated Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has brought different stakeholder groups together to engage in debate and discussion on public policy issues relevant to Internet Governance. Much of the literature analysing the IGF (and other multistakeholder institutions) has tended to focus on the design of the multistakeholder models, or has provided critique on the potentials of these models to realise decisions, focusing on the efficacy of the actors to achieve their goals. As this special issue recognises, there is need to dig a little deeper into the ways in which the governing community accepts and internalises norms, and continues to contest them once they are established (Radu, Kettemann, Meyer & Shahin, this issue). Understanding ‘who’ civil society is will allow us to assess potentials for norm entrepreneurship in the context of Internet Governance

Objectives

Results

Conclusion