Legitimacy of multistakeholderism in IG spaces | IGF 2023

Hortense Jongen

The importance of collaboration with various stakeholders is highlighted for effective governance and policy-making. The Netherlands has been actively engaged in working with a broad array of stakeholders since around 1200 to ensure protection against the North Sea. This long-standing collaboration reflects the significance of involving diverse groups in decision-making processes.

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is another example of a platform that promotes stakeholder engagement in discussions on an equal footing. Stakeholders from civil society, technology, business, and government come together to exchange ideas and perspectives. This inclusive approach fosters a more comprehensive and well-rounded decision-making process, leading to more effective governance and policy outcomes.

However, there are concerns regarding the uneven distribution of stakeholder representation in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It is noted that there are 182 members from government and 38 observers in ICANN, which is not equivalent to the 193 member count of the United Nations. Additionally, during the recent ICANN meeting, there were discrepancies in the number of government members and observers present, indicating an imbalance in geographical representation.

To address this issue, there have been calls for greater diversity in representation, particularly for the next round of generic top-level domains (GTLDs). Currently, there is a heavy Western bias in the distribution of registries and registrars. It is argued that more diversity is needed to ensure representation of different languages and scripts. This demand for diversity aligns with the global goals of gender equality, reduced inequalities, and peace and justice outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In conclusion, working together with various stakeholders is essential for adequate governance and policy-making. The Netherlands’ collaborative approach reflects the long-standing tradition of involving diverse groups in decision-making processes. The IGF provides a platform for stakeholders from different sectors to engage in dialogue, leading to more comprehensive outcomes. However, there is a need to address the uneven distribution of stakeholder representation in ICANN, with calls for greater diversity in future GTLDs to ensure a fair and inclusive internet governance system.

Jordan Carter

The analysis highlights the crucial importance of deepening and broadening participation in internet governance to enhance its legitimacy. It argues that inclusive participation plays a significant role in boosting the credibility and acceptance of initiatives related to internet governance. However, there is currently a deficit of participation from Global South participants, indicating an urgent need to address this issue.

One key factor in enhancing participation is effective funding. The analysis asserts that financial resources must be made available to ensure that individuals without economic means can actively participate in internet governance discussions and decision-making processes. By providing necessary support, such as travel expenses or technological resources, financial barriers can be overcome, allowing a wider range of voices and perspectives to be included.

Furthermore, the analysis suggests that upgrading the procedural legitimacy framework of internet governance is necessary. It recommends reviewing and adopting the foundations of internet governance used in the 2020s, specifically referring to the roadmap developed during the NetMundial process in 2014. By building on this existing framework, internet governance can be strengthened and made more effective, ensuring the inclusion of diverse stakeholders and promoting fair decision-making processes.

In addressing emerging policy questions, the analysis emphasises the need for new processes and institutions to deal with the changing landscape of the internet. As technology advances, new policy challenges arise, and it becomes crucial to determine the appropriate stakeholders for each issue. This requires careful consideration and deliberation to ensure that all relevant actors are involved and their perspectives are considered.

An advocate for a more inclusive, procedural, and adaptable approach to internet governance is Jordan Carter. According to Carter, a broader base of participation is essential for a truly democratic and effective governance system. Carter also encourages a review of the foundational procedures used in internet governance, suggesting that improvements and adjustments may be necessary to address the evolving needs of the internet ecosystem. Moreover, highlighting the importance of institutional innovation, Carter emphasises the need to engage the appropriate stakeholders, ensuring that relevant expertise and perspectives are included in decision-making processes.

Overall, the analysis stresses the significance of deepening and broadening participation in internet governance for its legitimacy. It highlights the deficits in participation from Global South participants and emphasises the importance of effective funding to overcome economic barriers. Additionally, it suggests upgrading the procedural legitimacy framework, establishing new processes and institutions, and engaging appropriate stakeholders to address emerging policy questions. Jordan Carter’s advocacy supports these points, emphasising the need for inclusivity, procedural improvements, and innovation in internet governance.

Elise Lindeberg

In the context of internet governance, there is a growing recognition of the importance of inclusive participation and its direct influence on the legitimacy and success of the multi-stakeholder model. This model aims to involve various stakeholders, including governments, civil society, academia, and the private sector, in decision-making processes related to internet governance. However, surveys and research indicate that there is a significant number of crucial voices and stakeholders who are not aware of or involved in these discussions, presenting a serious challenge to the model’s legitimacy.

The lack of inclusive participation places a responsibility on the participants currently involved in internet governance to address this concern. It is argued that in order to ensure the credibility and effectiveness of the multi-stakeholder model, broader communities should be meaningfully engaged in decision-making processes. This requires finding ways to include perspectives from underrepresented groups and ensuring that diverse voices are heard and taken into account. By doing so, the multi-stakeholder model can truly reflect the needs and interests of all stakeholders involved.

Another argument put forward is the need to strengthen existing forums rather than creating multiple new ones. One representative of a small state expresses concerns about the practicality and efficiency of following discussions in multiple forums. She suggests that reinforcing the forums already in place can lead to better utilization of resources and expertise. This approach can also foster deeper engagement and allow for more focused discussions. By consolidating efforts and resources, the internet governance community can maximize its impact and effectiveness.

Furthermore, the sharing of best practices and tangible measurable results within the internet governance community is advocated. A report from ODA highlights the potential for more focused dialogues between experts, leading to the identification and dissemination of best practices. It is proposed to measure the work done within these forums to increase clarity on the impact achieved. This can help draw more groups into the discussions and encourage participation from diverse stakeholders. By sharing and utilizing meaningful results, the internet governance community can enhance its effectiveness and drive positive change.

In conclusion, inclusive participation, the strengthening of existing forums, and the sharing of best practices and measurable results are highlighted as crucial aspects in ensuring the credibility and success of the multi-stakeholder model in internet governance. By addressing the challenge of inclusivity, streamlining efforts, and encouraging collaboration, the internet governance community can enhance legitimacy, drive meaningful outcomes, and foster a more inclusive and representative digital landscape.

Nadia Tjahja

Nadia Tjahja, a PhD fellow at the United Nations University and the Free University of Brussels, is conducting a thorough investigation into the legitimacy of multistakeholderism in internet governance. This exploration is being carried out through three publications that provide insights into the topic. Tjahja’s objective is to facilitate meaningful participation from various stakeholders and social groups in multistakeholder initiatives such as ICANN, ITF, and IGF.

The research reveals that youth are playing a critical role in creating new spaces within the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) when they perceive that the existing processes do not effectively engage them. This highlights their agency and underscores the need for inclusivity in internet governance. However, a challenge to meaningful engagement arises in the form of tokenized participation, where individuals or groups are given superficial representation without having a genuine impact on decision-making processes. This issue emphasises the importance of analysing and understanding the reasons why meaningful participation for such individuals is not feasible.

Tjahja’s research suggests a pyramid of participation, drawing on the elements of Arnstein’s ladder, to illustrate how individuals integrate within the IGF. This conceptual framework provides insights into the various levels of engagement and elucidates the failure of tokenized participation to enable meaningful involvement.

Furthermore, the significance of continuous evolution and feedback in youth participation at the IGF is highlighted. The YouthDIG initiative actively engages previous participants to gather their feedback and suggestions for improvement. Participants are also given the opportunity to join the YouthDIG org team, empowering them to implement the changes they desire. This approach fosters a dynamic and responsive environment, prioritising the voices of young individuals in shaping internet governance.

The analysis of Tjahja’s work underscores the importance of promoting diverse and inclusive participation in internet governance, particularly within multistakeholder initiatives. It also sheds light on the challenges posed by tokenized participation and the necessity of continuous evolution and feedback. By addressing these issues, the aim is to create a more equitable and effective framework for shaping the future of internet governance.

Corinne Cath

Internet governance organizations, although they may appear open in their procedures, often adopt culturally closed practices that exclude minority voices. These practices are reinforced by language barriers, limited accessibility, and cultural dynamics within these organizations, resulting in a lack of diversity and representation among the group that has clear access. Notably, findings from extensive participant observation and interviews within the Internet Engineering Task Force support these arguments, demonstrating the detrimental impact of exclusionary cultures on minority participation in decision-making processes. To address this issue, it is crucial to acknowledge the value of the multistakeholder model and actively work towards overcoming exclusionary and discriminatory practices. By doing so, we can ensure that all voices are heard and that decision-making processes are inclusive and equitable. Furthermore, it is concerning to observe growing corporate influence over Internet infrastructure, accompanied by increased surveillance practices, which poses a threat to the space for civil society within Internet governance. These trends highlight the erosion of democratic principles in Internet governance. In conclusion, addressing exclusionary practices is vital to promote diversity, inclusion, and the value of the multistakeholder model in Internet governance. Simultaneously, efforts must be made to counter the rise of corporate power and protect the space for civil society. Only by actively confronting these challenges can we guarantee a just, equitable, and representative Internet governance system that reflects the global Internet community.

Nadia Tjahja:
Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for coming to this launch event on the legitimacy of multistakeholderism in Internet governance spaces. My name is Nadia Tjahja and I’m a Ph.D. fellow at the United Nations University, Chris, and the Free University of Brussels. And today, I am pleased to invite you to explore three publications that look at the legitimacy of multistakeholderism. So today, we’ll have a presentation online from Dr. Hortense Jonge from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Then, it will be followed by Dr. Corinne Kaat, who sent in a presentation speaking about loud men talking loudly, exclusionary cultures of Internet governance. This will be followed with the launch of my publication on youth participation in Internet governance. And followed by these three publications, there is the Internet Governance Roadmap, Improving Multistakeholderism for Tomorrow, to provide us a perspective for the future. After this, we will invite you to come to the microphones and share your reflections and your ideas, but we would like to also question three questions. How can multistakeholder initiatives promote meaningful participation from diverse stakeholders and social groups? The second question, what is the relationship between inclusive participation and the legitimacy of multistakeholder initiatives? And the last question, what lessons for other multistakeholder bodies can we draw from the different ways in which the three multistakeholder bodies at the focus of this session, so in this case ICANN, ITF, and IGF, and aim to promote participation? To help us in these reflections and these discussions, we invited two discussants. So I would like to thank you very much to Elise Hever from the Dutch government, andElise Lindeberg from the Norwegian Communications Authority for joining us here today. So I would like to invite my co-moderator, Dr. Hortense Jonge, who is here with us today. who’s joining us online to start the first presentation.

Elise Lindeberg:
Thank you very much for your attention. Good morning, everyone. Sorry, let me just try to set this up. Can you all hear me? Yes, we can hear you. OK, great. Thank you so much. The presentation that I’ll be giving today, it was part of a larger research project that I worked on together with Professor Janet Schulte on legitimacy in ICANN, specifically the levels, the drivers, and the implications of legitimacy. I can only give a snapshot of some of the findings today and some of the key publications, but on each of the slides, I listed the key publications that give a lot more detailed information about each of these findings. But the publications, they all stem from one research project which asked a question, how far and on what grounds does multi-stakeholderism as a mode of global governing gain legitimacy? And specifically in this project, we measured the levels of legitimacy beliefs toward key multi-stakeholder apparatus, ICANN, and to try to identify what generates or what limits those legitimacy beliefs. And we studied this by means of a couple of hundreds of interviews with members of the board, with members of staff, the community, as well as also with several outsiders to ICANN. And we conducted this project between 2018 and 2019. So I think also in the next presentation’s legitimacy, it is interpreted in many different studies in vastly different ways. And in this study, we understand it as. as the belief and the perception that a governing body has the right to rule and also exercises that right appropriately. So concretely, we are interested in the opinion that ICANN has the right to formulate and administer certain rules for the global internet. So we understand legitimacy as underlying confidence in an approval of a governance arrangement, which encompasses a lot more than just passing support for a particular measure and instead entails deeper faith in the governance apparatus as such. And why do we focus on legitimacy? Well, both the literature, as well as many people that we interviewed, they indicate that legitimacy can help a governor. So in this case, ICANN to acquire mandates, obtain resources, attract participation, take decisions, and vice versa, if a governor does not have legitimacy or lower their lower legitimacy beliefs, it might be more difficult to acquire mandates or obtain resources, for example. So one of the first publications in this project, we sought to identify the levels and the patterns of legitimacy beliefs towards ICANN. On this slide, I’m summarizing the key four findings. I will pay most attention to this, and then I will be spending a little bit less time on different explanations for this. But when it comes to the different levels of legitimacy beliefs towards ICANN, we find that taking all audiences together, average levels of legitimacy beliefs towards ICANN are neither so high as to warrant complacency, nor so low as to prompt alarm. So we also find that these legitimacy beliefs towards ICANN generally correlate with closeness to the ICANN regime. So it’s fairly secure legitimacy on the inside, amongst the board, the staff, the community, and then it gets somewhat more wobbly the further we get removed from the ICANN core. Several exceptions aside, legitimacy believes within the ICANN sphere. So board community staff show limited variation by stakeholder group, by geographical region or by social category. And we also find that there’s no glaring of killer’s heel of vulnerability in any quarter, but also no striking concentration of greater ICANN champions, with the exception perhaps of staff and board who have notably stronger legitimacy beliefs. Then a key question of course is how can we explain these legitimacy beliefs? And how can we understand why some people have more confidence in ICANN than others? So in a series of publications, we are trying to find out what are the sources, the drivers or the causes of legitimacy beliefs. So what conditions can be fostered or attacked in order to bolster or undermine legitimacy beliefs. And we focus specifically on three types of explanations, organizational drivers, so institutional drivers that have to do with ICANN as an organization, the way it works, its procedures, its purpose, its performance. Individual drivers that lie with the people who actually ascribe or do not ascribe legitimacy or have confidence in ICANN. And societal drivers that have to do with broader societal structures. I’ll very quickly go over some of the key findings but here on the bottom of the slides, you can also see some of the publications that discussed this a lot more extensively. But we do find that actually a large number of institutional sources are positively associated with legitimacy beliefs toward ICANN. Think for example of accountability, fair decision-taking procedures, timely decision-taking and several aspects related to the purpose or the mission that ICANN stands for. We also find that several individual level drivers. of ICANN are positively associated with legitimacy in ICANN. So it matters what a member, a participant, a perceiver, so to say, someone who ascribes or does not ascribe legitimacy as a member of the ICANN board and staff, who notably have higher, on average have higher confidence in ICANN than members from the ICANN community. And people who feel that they have benefited personally from ICANN and its policies also tend to accord or more likely to accord legitimacy to ICANN. And finally, we looked at several societal level drivers or explanations of legitimacy in ICANN. And what I’m focusing on here specifically is perceptions of structural inequalities, for example, based on age, ethnicity, race, gender, geopolitics, language. And to sum up, actually a very extensive discussion, but we found that a lot of participants perceive structural inequalities in ICANN, do find them problematic, but that most of them do not in my mind their confidence in ICANN with the exception perhaps of inequalities, problematic inequalities based on the geopolitics, so between the global north and the global south. So to summarize, legitimacy understood as approval of ICANN as a governance mechanism for the global internet is important. We find that ICANN has fairly secure legitimacy amongst its insiders, then it starts to wane off a little bit gradually the further we get removed. And we find multiple and variable drivers of these levels of ICANN legitimacy beliefs. So there’s not a simple formula available to solve all legitimacy challenges. And we also believe that knowing what levels of legitimacy beliefs prevail in what quarters and what kinds of forces shape those legitimacy beliefs can nevertheless contribute to more informed and nuanced policymaking. Thank you very much.

Nadia Tjahja:
Thank you very much, Hortense, for your presentation. Then I will share my screen, and we’ll show the presentation of Dr. Corinne Kath, who is unfortunately not able to be here today. And you should be able to see it now. I think we can’t hear her, so the sound is not connected. Am I screen sharing? Yes. So do you know why the sound is not working for the presentation? So while I wait to figure out what is happening with this, I propose I’ll just go straight into my own presentation. So her presentation is a pre-recorded session, so she’s not actually with us online. But thank you so much for paying attention, because otherwise if she was still talking, that would have been a little bit awkward for all of us. So in the meantime, I’ll share my own screen again and start my own presentation. We did it in order of the year of publication. So we started with Dr. Hortense Junge first, Corinne Kath, who just published earlier this year. And I am pleased. that I am going to launch my publication today. So, fortunately I don’t need sound for mine. Nope, that’s not my presentation slides either. I think I’m confused now. So, while I figure this out, could I kindly ask, I’m sorry to have to put you on the spot like this, but Mr. Carter, please, could you share your vision for multi-stakeholderism while we’ve sorted out technical issues?

Jordan Carter:
I can, yes. Thanks, Nadia, and good morning everyone who’s in the room and good evening or good night wherever the rest of you might be online. I was hoping to be riffing a little bit more off the content that had come through in the other presentations, so I’ll actually be quite brief at this point. OUDA is the Australian Demand Administration. We operate the .au ccTLD for Australia. And the reason that we put together a roadmap on internet governance was simply to try and provoke some discussion and dialogue among the internet community about the ways that internet governance might need to be improved to make it more functional for the deeply complicated digital governance environment we all face in the 2020s and beyond. Because of the nature of this launch event, I just wanted to focus in on a couple of aspects of legitimacy and to do that, relating to some of the things that we said in the roadmap. It’s not a promo thing, but you can find the roadmap and read it on our website if you like, ouda.org.au. So I think there are three. We talked a bit about the importance of deepening and broadening. that we’re offering, that more broadly based participation is going to enhance the outcomes and outputs that come from Internet governance processes, for the same reason that we say that they work at all. If you get the right mix of stakeholders, if you get the right mix of stakeholders, you’re going to get the right results. So I think that’s a really good point. The idea is that the solutions that get developed by that process will be more likely to work and will be more likely to be accepted by the participants and by other people who can rely on the right expertise as having been present. So that goes to one of the discussion questions. Our view is inclusive participation does enhance the legitimacy of these initiatives. And one of the challenges and one of the, it’s a bit of a truism in some of the institutions that have been talked about already that most of the protagonists are from particular regions of the world and that there are deficits of participation if you want to take a deficit model from Global South participants, from people who are not from Europe or North America in particular. And one of the things that I think is material to that is providing effective funding approaches so that people without the economic resources to be able to participate have opportunities to do so in a meaningful way. And another which I think will come up in one of the other presentations is about the culture of these affairs. It’s been 10 plus years since I attended my first ICANN meeting as an example. And some people were very friendly and welcoming. And some people were very off-putting and arrogant. And I’m sure it’s the same experience today. And I come with a set of attributes and cultural capital that means I will have had an easier journey into some of that than other people do. The second thing I want to talk about in terms of legitimacy is the procedural legitimacy that can come from agreed decision-making frameworks, if you like, the constitution of Internet governance. One of the things we articulated in our paper was the notion that there should be a review of the foundations of Internet governance, how it is practiced in the 2020s and beyond. We leaned a bit on the roadmap that was developed in the NetMundial process in 2014 as an example of that kind of framework, but there are other normative and procedural frameworks that are out there about how IG should work, and our view is again that if you assemble the breadth of stakeholders and the diversity of stakeholders that are required, the legitimacy of those underpinning frameworks will be enhanced. And the third one I’ll just briefly mention is the institutional innovation question. There are some policy questions these days that have emerged in the technology milieu that are on the agenda at Internet governance events like this. You know, you’ll have noticed by now the focus on AI at this year’s IGF. It isn’t immediately obvious that the right assemblage of stakeholders to deal with Internet governance questions is automatically going to be the right assemblage of stakeholders to deal with other policy questions. So it might be the case that new processes and institutions are needed to deal with new policy questions that become quite remote from the Internet, which is an essential service for many of these technology stacks, but that might engage very much different stakeholder groups. And if we keep trying to shoehorn all of the issues that relate to the Internet, and issues that don’t relate to the Internet but that make use of the Internet, into a single framework, then the Internet governance system isn’t the Internet governance system anymore, it’s just the governance system. It’s just running the world. And so we do need to think about the boundaries of the material that we’re dealing with, and the necessary stakeholders that we need to engage within those boundaries. to build the legitimacy of the work that is done within them. So I hope that’s progressed a few thoughts. I saw some nods and some head shakes, which is perfect by my point of view. And I’ll pass back to you, Nadia. Thanks.

Nadia Tjahja:
Thank you so much for your comments. So hopefully I have figured it out quite right now. And we will be able to see Dr. Kareem Kath joining us on the screen.

Corinne Cath:
And the title of this panel suggests, and given I’m not there in person, I will be giving some guidance on the slides as we go. So next slide, please. So in this brief talk, I will try and do three specific things. Provide a bit of an introduction to the PhD research that I’ve done, specifically looking at internet governance cultures and their rougher edges. Summarize some of my key findings as I have published them in a recent report called Loud Men Talking Loudly on the Exclusionary Cultures of Internet Governance, which was a report that I published for the launch of the Critical Infrastructure Lab at the University of Amsterdam. The report is on their website. And also go check out their work if you haven’t heard of them yet. They’re really wonderful. And then I’ll hand over to the next speaker or Q&A or whatever Nadia thinks is best. Next slide, please. So by way of introduction, my name is Kareem Kath. I’m an anthropologist of internet governance. I wrote an ethnography of the Internet Engineering Task Force and finished my PhD. Ph.D. in Oxford in 2021. I currently work at the University of Delft where I’m doing postdoctoral research on the politics of cloud computing, but this particular topic remains near and dear to me. Next slide, please. So what I’ll be doing today is present some of the research that derives from my Ph.D. where I wrote an ethnography about an important Internet governance body called the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the Internet Engineering Task Force is one of the oldest Internet governance bodies that makes key protocols and standards that enable networks to connect. And I know the importance of the role of the technical community is top of mind for many of you in the room, and I think this research, research that I’ve done, sort of speaks to both the capacities and the limitations and the importance of including civil society explicitly into the work that the technical community does. And you can also find my Ph.D. research, which is published on my website. Next slide, please. Now I know that all of you have better things to do than to read a hundred and odd, 180-odd page academic thesis, so let me just summarize some of my findings about the exclusionary and sometimes discriminatory aspects of Internet governance organizations for you as I’ve outlined in the report that you can see over there. No, sorry, over there. Next slide, please. In the report, as in some of my other academic work, which is based on multiple years of fieldwork and participant observation within the Internet Engineering Task Force, as well as numerous semi-structured interviews with people who work in these kind of spaces, I really ask the question of how suitable certain Internet governance organizations are for civil society participation, and what this tells us about Internet governance. intergovernance cultures and how those can be both open and exclusionary at the same time. And the reason why I think it is important to look at this is because if all of us didn’t, to a certain extent, believe in the importance of the openness of intergovernance or the value of the multistakeholder model, we wouldn’t be here participating in the IGF today. Especially for some of us, because for some of us it’s the dead of night. And this is all very true, but I’ve also found that two things can be true at the same time. The multistakeholder model can be important and can be a valuable model for governing the Internet and other technologies. And at the same time, the practice by which it is done can be discriminatory to minority voices, especially those of civil society, representing human rights values, the voices of women and voices of people from the majority world. And if we want to maintain the openness of the multistakeholder model, we need to, with some urgency, address these ways in which intergovernance cultures can be exclusionary and discriminatory. And as I’m sure you know, I’m not the only one stressing the urgency of dealing with some of the inequities that are inherent to who can afford to be part of Internet governance communities. Tackling these inequities, I believe, is a better and a preferable route than, as some others have suggested, restating Internet governance in a multilateral fashion. I believe that pursuing a multilateral approach, just because the multistakeholder model is one that is less than perfect, is perhaps throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But at the same time, I also believe we need to go much beyond deepening and broadening participation, as some people advocate for, as participants are still going to be, especially minority voices, are still going to be incredibly unlikely to stay involved. when the cultures in which they are expected to participate are going to be hostile to their needs and to their presence. Next slide. So my report lays out what loud men as an organizational culture in some internet governance organizations costs us when we’re striving for an internet that serves a diverse public interest. Next slide, please. And some of the findings that I want to share with you today are on this slide. So what we see is that many seemingly open, many seemingly accessible internet governance organizations where key debates about internet infrastructure or policies happen, where web standards are discussed, where the functioning browsers are discussed, et cetera, are, even though they seem procedurally open, are culturally closed off, can be hostile, can be surprisingly hard to participate in, especially for civil society folks, especially for women, and again, especially for participants in the majority world. And what happens is these exclusionary cultures create this invisible barrier that makes it extra hard for these groups to be able to participate, even though they are bringing a very, very much needed noncommercial public interest perspective to debates about technical functioning of the internet. And while many civil society participants in this room might not be surprised by these findings or by these different hurdles and barriers that I outline in the rest of my research, there is comparatively little, at least academic documentation of this type of hostility in existing research literature or even in policymaker conversations about internet governance. And it is another topic that we need to put on the table if we are to maintain the good bits of the multistakeholder model. Next slide, please. And we often tend to talk… about how open Internet Governance Organizations are. And that’s true along some axis. I found, however, that there is a bit of a disconnect between procedural openness, which is a slightly lower bar that many Internet Governance Organizations will meet, to some extent at least, and actual accessibility. And this disconnect, in part, stems from different cultural dynamics. What we see is that Internet Governance Organizations routinely tend to cater to particular groups of people, taking their assumptions and their expectations as the standard, and doing not enough to accommodate and anticipate different perspectives and needs. Now, for example, we are all here, primarily speaking English to each other, right? So English is often the working language in a lot of these organizations with an American orientation towards the market as the primary form of governance also being very endemic. Meetings occur at different sites across the globe. Again, IGF being but one example of that. And a lot of these locations are incredibly hard to access for people from the majority world who face all sorts of visa challenges and a heavier financial burden when it comes to traveling. Same for people with caretaking responsibilities, with employers that cannot foot the bill for long distance travel, for people with disabilities, et cetera, et cetera. It becomes very hard to participate. So the group that is left is a group that can participate, but it’s a smaller group, often one that is much more homogenous than the Internet community that they end to serve. And it is these subtle and cultural ways in which the day-to-day functioning of Internet governance can exclude groups that need to be heard. And if we take ourselves serious as a community, then we need to address these rough edges in earnest. Next slide. So the open multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance, in which all different parties joining and using the network contribute to decisions about its functioning, is integral to the Internet’s success. Now, this is especially crucial at this moment in time when we see that corporate power over Internet infrastructure is growing, government and private surveillance is growing, and the space for civil society to act is shrinking. So for better or for worse, Internet governance organizations are still a place where the public can claim a seat at the table. But in order for that seat to actually lead to anything concrete, much more work is needed to ensure that these Internet governance bodies live up to their promise of being accessible and open to all. And the work that I’ve done provides one entry into showing why that is not always currently the case. And so what I hope is that if you take away one thing from this presentation, let it be this. Internet governance organizations may be procedurally open, but they can be culturally closed off and unwelcoming in practice. And the gap between the rules on paper on the one hand and this reality in practice can be explained in part for the exclusionary effect of its cultures. And it is these cultures that make it difficult for civil society to be able to join decision-making processes they so urgently need to join. And again, understanding how this plays out should curb our impulse to position Internet governance organizations also as naturally capable of delivering us an Internet that answers to the public. It’s unfortunately not that simple. So coming to my final words here. Designations of Internet governance organizations as exemplary in this regard often depend on ignoring or at least disregarding the exclusionary effects of cultural dynamics in favor of surface-level procedural access. And we as a community can and must do better. And not just for our own sake, but also to push back arguments made by detractors to the multistakeholder. stakeholder model. And I think that the fact that we’re coming here today is a clear sign of the fact that we as a community can and must do better. Thank you so much.

Nadia Tjahja:
Thank you very much to Dr. Corinne Kath for sharing her presentation. So it’s been my pleasure to share my own presentation about youth participation in internet governance. So my research for my PhD has been looking at multistakeholderism in internet governance. And specifically, the stakeholder group that I’ve chosen was youth. We always talk about meaningful youth participation. Our common agenda asked for looking at mechanisms on how to engage our youth in policymaking processes. We have spoken about an IGF working strategy on the inclusion of youth. We have the IGF youth track. And so one of the things that I set out to do is to understand youth in these spaces. And for this, my research looked at an agent of change, youth meta-participation at the IGF, where I looked at how youth are creating new spaces within the IGF when they see that the processes that they’re getting involved with do not reflect or engage in the manner that they find approachable or that they have access to. So they use existing mechanisms within the IGF to create new spaces, or they create additional spaces that align with the values of the IGF. I created a policy brief on youth participation in internet governance with recommendations on how youth can be further integrated. And for this year’s Annual Symposium of Giganettes. I presented the youth participation on regional and global level, the dynamics of meaningful youth participation. And with this latest article, I proposed a definition for what is meaningful participation which is based on the definition from Malcolm and the definition I came with was aiming to capture the extent to which the processes in question are effectively designed to incorporate the viewpoints of youth participants into the development of internet governance policies in a balanced way, this being the essential feature from which this subset of multi-stakeholder processes can claim democratic legitimacy. Building on that, I used a revision of Arnstein’s ladder. Arnstein’s ladder looks at non-participation, tokenism and citizen power and when they describe Arnstein’s ladder and use case studies, they use each rung and give an example. But what I find with the Internet Governance Forum that it is an ecosystem. It is more than just this individual component is separate from each other. So I proposed a pyramid of participation. I used elements of the ladder to propose a pyramid in which we see how we integrate within the IGF. So we integrate first. You’re sitting here today and I’m speaking with you now and our other speakers shared their thoughts and ideas with you about their research, about the work that they’ve done, their perceptions, their interpretations of what they see and what they’ve researched. So you’re being informed. But we will open up the floor and we’ll have reflections from our discussants and have asked them to consult, to provide input, to exchange. And this is how we integrate. We become familiar with content and with processes. But at some point… you come into this leadership position, you come here as a partnership, maybe some of you are session organizers and you collaborate with the community to create your sessions. And maybe some of us will work closely with the IGF Secretariat as consultants or a form of a facilitator where you have delegated power to facilitate particular positions. And I mentioned before when these structures are not achieving the aims and goals that you have, you can go into meta-participation where you feel you have some control to create the systems that you want, which can be used through processes of the IGF or creating your own processes aside that you align with the IGF. And then of course what Arnstein’s Ladder talks about is tokenized participation and this is something that when I created the Pyramid of Participation I believed that it was outside of the scope. I believe that when we have purpose, we want it to be meaningful. And there is a tokenized processes, but tokenized processes were not included in this study so when we felt that there were tokenized activities or things that were interpreted as tokenized, it means that meaningful participation has failed us. And then in this research that I’ve done I analyzed it through the lens of why and how they are not able to meaningfully participate rather than looking at it as this process was made to tokenize you. I believe that we want to have meaningful participation and sometimes we fail and how did we fail that. So here are just a few examples. Using the Pyramid of Participation and interviews with European participants from EURIDIC and YouthDIG, I looked at which activities that they participated in and what they felt was their purpose and how they thrived, but also how they felt that the structure or their personal ambitions failed them. So, when they come into the integration part where they’re informing and consulting at EuroDIG, they were learning about the content, they were learning about how EuroDIG works, the processes. They assessed what was the structure accessibility. Are you capable of engaging or not? And they learned that when you are part of the EuroDIG community, this can lead to responsibilities and that’s a form of integration. You then move towards a natural way into the leadership positions. But, on the other hand, when we see that meaningful participation has failed is when personal reasons, motherhood, for example, or fatherhood, or they found that their career opportunities were not aligned with their ambitions or they had structural reasons why they were not able to engage. For example, when there are time zone problems, when there are different opportunities that were not aligned such as the topics of that year doesn’t align with your personal ambitions. And then we go through this entire system at both EuroDIG, but also at the global IGF. So, at the global IGF, we looked at the different ways participants attend from YouthDIG to EuroDIG and to the IGF. And where were they capable of contributing on the informing consulting level, but also where meaningful participation had failed. And therefore, I am pleased to share with you, because of my research and the support of the EuroDIG Secretariat, I was able to look and reflect on YouthDIG, the Youth Dialogue on Internet Governance. governance, the pre-event for youth to Eurodig, for them to learn about the context in which Eurodig will present that year, to learn about the processes and how to integrate into Eurodig community. And based on this, I created a publication which you can find at the Eurodig booth, which talks about the Eurodig philosophy. If you remember the definition of meaningful participation, remember that we spoke about structure, about how to contribute and how youth are continuously evolving. And this publication reflects on how we approached YouthDIG, how can we integrate them and how can we further their continuous meaningful participation. And we hope that you will reflect on this publication and also come back to us with feedback because it’s always the importance that we have with YouthDIG that we always engage our participants to ask them if they come back next year, how would you do it? What would you change to make your participation more meaningful? They give us our feedback and then we invite them to join the YouthDIG org team to implement what they would like to see, the change that they would like to see. And that is what this publication hopes to do to further continue this discussion about how can we continue meaningful participation from the regional to the global IGF. So thank you very much. I would then like to ask our discussants for their initial reflections of our three presentations and the questions that we had. And in the meantime, if you have any comments or questions, please do come to the microphone. But then I would like to ask Ms. Lindenberg if you could start with your comments.

Elise Lindeberg:
Thank you. And thank you for being invited. Well, there’s a lot of questions you asked us. So what is the. relationship between inclusive participation and the legitimacy of the multi-stakeholder model. I don’t think anyone questions that there is a strong link. We discuss it all the time, also in the high-level panels, that ensuring inclusive and meaningful participation from the border communities, the core, is crucial for the multi-stakeholder model. And that some of the research and surveys that you mentioned now shows that there are several important voices, stakeholders, that are not aware of the discussions we have in internet governance. And of course, that’s a huge challenge for the legitimacy of the multi-stakeholder community. And lays the great responsibilities of us who are already participating in what we should do with that problem. So I don’t think anyone questions the importance of discussions like this. And what can we do then? Well, I think that one thing we should look into is also the various forums that we have. As a small state, I represent the Norwegian government. We are a bit concerned if we have a lot of arenas that we discuss the same topics. Because it is challenging to follow all the different discussions, if it is a lot of different forums. And I’m not talking about the forums that are national or regional, because that feeds into this discussion and is very important. But we should also, I think, concentrate on making the forums we already have stronger. So that’s one thing. Making the most out of the existing structure we already have. And I also think that we should go deeper into sharing best practices. within the IGF and the multi-stakeholder community. I think the report from ODA shows that you have room within the multi-stakeholder system like IGF for more focused dialogue between experts and sharing best practices. I think that’s one thing that would make it even more meaningful to participate and would draw broader groups into the IGF and multi-stakeholder discussions. So, good sharing of practices. Maybe we should also start to measuring what we are doing in some way to see how we impact the involvement of the Internet in these forums because it is discussions, but we also need to see some meaningful results for others to take from this community and take home and to make best practices more shared. I think that’s one thing that we can contribute more to. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much.

Nadia Tjahja:
And then quickly, Miss Hortense, if I could have your reflections.

Hortense Jongen:
Yes, thank you. Yes, so I’ll try to keep it really brief because I already saw we’re over time. But, yeah, coming from the Netherlands, working together with a broad array of stakeholders is very common. We’ve been pollering since approximately 1200, and that was to protect ourselves from the North Sea. And we’ve done that with a broad array of stakeholders. So I could maybe say it’s in my veins to talk with stakeholders, but it’s not something that’s always common for governments to do. And I think that’s very special about the IGF, that we’re talking together on an equal footing and that we have the opportunity to talk with civil society, with the tech community, with the business community, and with governments. that it’s not government inviting you to say whatever you think and well okay thank you we’ll see you next year but I really hope for for meaningful participation and I just wanted to reflect briefly on ICAN as I’m the Dutch GAC representative so that’s for the government stakeholder advisory advisory committee in ICAN and about participation in ICAN I still don’t see that all governments are represented in ICAN at the moment there are 182 members from government and 38 observers so that’s not the 193 that the UN counts as as government but also at the last ICAN meeting there were 73 government members participating and eight observers I didn’t do a quick regional check but it’s I’m pretty sure it’s not an equal distribution across the world and despite the fact that it’s not equal in in the GAC it’s even less equal I’m pretty sure in the other stakeholder groups so I personally hope to see with the next round of GTLDs which so that’s generic top-level domains and I would hope to see that this stakeholder group becomes more diverse with a broader array of of top-level domains in other languages and other scripts and ensuring that more registries and registrars are equally distributed across the world and that it doesn’t have this immense Western, immense Western grouping where they are currently. So, yeah, that would be two of my reflections on your questions, and hopefully we can have one or two remarks from others, thanks.

Nadia Tjahja:
Thank you very much. I fear that there’s not a lot of time left over because the opening ceremony will start soon, and I think that everybody would want to join that. But certainly, I do not believe that this conversation has to stop here, and I’d be welcome, and also my colleagues are also keen on furthering the discussion, but I would like to thank you all so very much for coming here today in reflection, and I apologize for the technical problems that we had today that we could not engage better. But I would also like to thank very much the staff for doing their very best to ensure that everything is running smoothly, but also the captioners that are writing things live, and those who are interpreting into English and Japanese for their services here today. So thank you all very much, and we hope to continue this conversation. Have a really lovely IGF. Thank you. Thank you.