Suchergebnisse

Inclusiveness, accountability and transparency carry different meanings in the context of different public policy processes, and for different stakeholder groups engaged in those processes. In particular, civil society has had a substantial role in conceptualising these meanings in internet governance policy spaces, but a much reduced rule in their explication in trade policymaking. It will be argued that greater support for trade policymaking could arise from a project to reconcile civil society's expectations of the inclusiveness, accountability and transparency of trade negotiations with the political realities of the trade negotiator, while at the same time enhancing negotiators' appreciation of the metrics that civil society stakeholders will use in assessing trade negotiations, especially those that relate to the internet.

Just as the so-called multi-stakeholder model of internet governance has attained broad acceptance, it has also begun to attract criticism for how elastic that term is, extending to processes that at best offer limited opportunity for meaningful stakeholder inclusion, and at worst may be a front for corporate self-regulation or government policy whitewashing. There is an apparent need for a set of criteria to distinguish these deficient processes from those that truly do promote policy-making that includes the perspectives of all affected stakeholders. This paper proposes such a set of criteria.