IGF 2018 WS #86
Multistakeholder Governance in the global south

Organizer 1: Agustina Del Campo, CELE (Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information)

Speaker 1: Laura Tresca, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 2: Guilherme Canela Godoi , Intergovernmental Organization, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: Carolina Botero, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)

Moderator

Agustina Del Campo, CELE

Online Moderator

Paulina Gutierrez, Articulo 19 Mexico

Rapporteur

Paula Roko, CELE

Format

Round Table - 60 Min

Interventions

Following an interview-style format, the workshop seeks to have all participants responding to common questions from different perspectives and experiences.
Laura Tresca, representing Article 19 Brazil on the workshop and former civil society representative at CGI.br, will provide the Brazilian perspective. Brazil was among the first countries in the world to establish a multistakeholder mechanism for local internet governance.
Carolina Botero, representing Fundación Karisma in Colombia, will assess how internet governance initiatives have worked in Colombia, and different initiatives that the organization has promoted or seen to promote further engagement and equal participation for multistakeholder actors.
Guilherme Canela, representing UNESCO, has been involved in efforts to engage new actors as well as the judiciary in internet governance initiatives, and is best positioned to asses the relationship between governance and jurisprudence and the importance of opening the conversations

Diversity

Speakers represent a wide range of actors including academia, civil society and international organizations. Most of the speakers convened or this workshop are women and overall they represent the region widely. Other invited speakers will ideally include the technical and government sectors as well.

The workshop will adopt an interview-style dynamic. Speakers will first be asked to describe briefly their internet governance structures locally, their relevance and the levels of participation achieved within them. A second round of questions will deal with initiatives to enhance internet governance participation within the created forums. A third line of questions will assess how other actors, including the judiciary, the legislative bodies within the government interact with multistakeholder spaces, what level of influence they have; and how different initiatives have sought to enhance their understanding and active participation in internet governance issues. Finally, there will be a summary of conclusions drawn from the conversation, best practices (if any) and challenges that these local governance initiatives face that could be built into a model to replicate in other contexts and countries to strengthen multistakeholderism. Formal interventions will be followed by open discussion of the conclusions reached and wide opportunity for online and on site participation will be provided, with guided questions to the audience, including models in other countries or regions and parallel initiatives and experiences that could add to and complement regional efforts.

The agenda will begin with 5 minutes of opening remarks and a brief presentation of the speakers by a moderator from CELE. Each invited participant will have 7 minutes to comment; this will be followed by 15 minutes of questions proposed by the moderator in order to foster an internal discussion in the roundtable as well as to induce to the development of common ideas and a potential roadmap. Then, the moderator will open the floor for further questions and comments from the audience until the session reaches 65 minutes.
The overall idea is for participants to trigger debate and encourage participation through comments and insights.

In recent years different countries in Latin America have attempted to create local internet governance spaces in addition to the more established Latin America & Caribbean Internet Governance Forum (LAC IGF). Created under different models and with different structures and rules of engagement, these spaces have tried to address the most current and urgent internet governance issues within the local spheres. Still, both settled spaces and incipient ones face challenges in engaging multistakeholder participation in terms of equality. The issue is not exclusive to local governance but quite to the contrary, they are also affecting global spaces, bringing about questions regarding its future. There have been numerous conferences, forums and gatherings focused on issues of governance, particularly concerned with accurate representation within the spaces.

This workshop seeks to provide an overview of how local and regional governance forums have been working; how are those spaces developing through time and particularly identify the challenges they face. Building on ongoing conversations regarding the future of internet governance and multistakeholderism, including Rightscon 2018 panel "Is multistakeholderism advancing, dying or evolving?", the panel will focus on existing initiatives to promote and enhance multistakeholder participation in the spaces, and identify best practices to increase the quality of such participation. Ideally, the workshop will identify concrete common best practices across different Latin American countries.

Online Participation

Social media and hashtags will be used in order to encourage remote participation and collect comments from remote participants. This will be particularly enhanced in previous days so that participants can schedule it accordingly. These questions will be forwarded to the panel moderator when she/he opens the floor for questions from the audience. A pad also will be created in order to reflect the key issues raised during the discussion and will allow these discussions to be available for remote participants.