New study published on multistakeholder governance
Since the internet’s inception, people have been grappling with the question of how it should be governed.
In recent years, these discussions have increasingly centered on the advantages and disadvantages of multistakeholderism—referring, in the words of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, to a model ‘in which affected stakeholders who want to participate in decision making can, yet where no single interest can unilaterally capture control’.
The increasingly fraught debate around the transfer of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) oversight from the Department of Commerce to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) illustrates the importance of becoming smarter about whether, when and where multistakeholder governance works.
We’re delighted to publish a new contribution to this debate by Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder GovLab and a member of GPD’s Advisory Board.
Stefaan’s paper, ‘The practice and craft of multistakeholder governance’, examines a range of current and actual instances of governance in the digital environment which embody (or at least approximate) the ideal of multistakeholderism, asking what lessons can be learned— and what these examples tell us about the state of, and prospects for, internet governance.