Democracy at its simplest and most basic is governance by and for the people. Of course, there are a variety of conventions and values that are often invoked in the context of “democratic governance” and particularly for “democratic governments”, but democracy as governance by and for the governed would seem to be sufficient as a definition and particularly in the absence of formal structures, rules, behaviours or governmental structures.
I’ve elsewhere discussed how various instances of Multi-stakeholderism (MSism) have operated in the absence of or even in opposition to conventional understandings of democracy. However, continuing discussion and evolution in the way in which governance concerning the global Internet is being conceptualized is suggesting an approach to this governance which involves “democratic multi-stakeholderism” (DMsism). This, it is being suggested, may be one method of squaring the circle where the historical circumstances of Internet development – largely but not exclusively through multi-stakeholder processes primarily driven and controlled by those with a technical interest and responsibility for Internet development are perceived as being necessary for the continued well-being of the Internet as it enters into an increasingly complex and politicized environment. This, it is argued is particularly the case as matters of “Internet Governance” shift focus from largely technical issues to issues involving broad areas of public policy as impacted by actions by and on the Internet.
The difficulty with creating or even conceptualizing a “democratic multi-stakeholderism” is that at it’s core MSism is not “democratic”. Thus the governance notion implicit in MSism is one where governance is by and for those with a “stake” in the governance decision thus shifting the basis of governance from one based on people and (at least indirectly) citizenship or participation in the broad community of the governed to one based on “stakes” i.e. an “interest” in the domain to which the governance apparatus is being applied. The historical notion of “stake” in a context such as this one generally refers to a financial or ownership interest in the area under discussion but in the evolving Internet Governance sphere (and others) this has been extended to include a “technical stake” (as in a professional interest) or even a “normative stake” as in ensuring an outcome which is consistent with one’s values or norms.
What is not included in any of the conventional approaches to MSism however, are broad notions of democratic participation (or accountability) i.e. where the governance is structured so as to include for example, those without a “direct” stake in the outcomes but who nevertheless might as a consequence of their simple humanity be understood to be impacted by the decisions being taken. Discussions around these matters are often dealt with within the MS community by talking about the need (or not) to include (technology/Internet) “users” as “stakeholders”. I’ve looked at that discussion elsewhere and argued that when it comes to the current status of the Internet we are all i.e. all of humanity, now in one way or another being impacted either directly or indirectly by the Internet and in that sense we are all “stakeholders” in how the Internet is framed and enabled in its future evolution (i.e. “governed”).
By extending “stakeholder” status to “users” and then recognizing that we are all in some way “Internet users” the problem of DMSism, some argue may be solved. The problem however, remains in that a MS approach as currently being proposed involves a degree of equality of participation/influence by each of the stakeholder groups (in the Internet Governance jargon–“equal footing“) which would in this instance mean that for example, decisions made where the private sector or government or the technical community etc. was highly influential would not by definition be governance decisions made by the governed except in the trivial sense that since those stakeholder groups also consist of people then all decisions would of course all be made by “people” whatever their (temporary) stakeholder status.
To me it is quite clear that “democratic governance” and “multi-stakeholder governance” are internally in contradiction with each other. At their core, democracy as in the “rule of the people” is one form of government and multi-stakeholderism as in” the rule of “stakeholders”” is another and competing form. I don’t think that they can be reconciled.
Some are arguing that elements of Participatory Democracy (PD) may provide the appropriate direction and this certainly may be the case. However, current experience with PD suggests that there is considerable need for maturation in these processes and particularly in developing means for effective and efficient decision making and for scaling from localized small scale to larger processes.
What I do see as being possible and which is where I think our collective thinking should go is toward redefining how democratic governance can/should operate in the Internet era and particularly (or at least initially) in the “governance” of the global Internet. The Internet “has changed everything” including how we can and should govern ourselves and the various aspects of our daily and collective lives. This has been done both by changing how we live those lives and by changing how we are able to act and project ourselves in our lived and collective worlds both physically and virtually. But to effectively respond we need to evolve our institutions and mechanisms of governance. We do this not by discarding our current norms and practices such as democracy which has done so much to enable, empower, and enrich the lives of all who have access to this. Rather we do this by allowing and facilitating an evolution in those institutions and mechanisms to take advantage of the new opportunities that technology provides and to respond to the new risks and challenges which technology has equally presented to us.
The list of those opportunities and challenges is a long and growing one and our first task is to develop the means for assimilating and responding to these. A first step in this long road is to begin the process of identification of the issues which need to be addressed in these revised mechanisms for democratic governance in the Internet era:
1. The need for a means to incorporate technical expertise and those who consider themselves neutral technical stewards of various aspects of the Internet into mechanisms for Internet governance and to broaden the base of this stewardship to include those from a wide diversity of backgrounds and interests
2. Finding ways of responding in our strategies and mechanisms of governance to the speed of technology change and the unpredictability of the impacts of these changes including through economic and social redistribution, disruption of production systems and employment, huge transfers and accumulations of wealth (and power), among others
3. Recognizing the apparent disengagement of large numbers of the population from current conventional governance and representative processes
4. Reacting to and finding ways of incorporating the apparent desire for direct (disintermediated) engagement of large numbers of the population in current informal technology mediated processes associated with the management of various activities associated with daily living particularly in developed societies
5. Taking as a necessary challenge finding ways of resolving the escalating divides in the technology sphere including between those who have and are able to use online systems for purposes of engagement and those who are not or less able because of issues of location, income, gender, technical and other forms of literacy among others
6. Finding mechanisms to respond to the globalization of the nature of the decision making/consultation which needs to be undertaken given the globalized nature of the issues/technology
7. Developing the fortitude to not be intimidated by the extreme significance of the matters under discussion given the vast economic, political, strategic and security interests among others now impacted by the Internet and digital platforms overall, thus increasing the likelihood even inevitability of attempts at undemocratic subversion of democratic processes in support of one or another corporate or national interest
8. Recognizing and celebrating the opportunity for using digital means to extend opportunities for effective participation, for enhancing the quality of decision making through information provision and support for dialogue
We need to develop appropriate responses and mechanisms as a matter of considerable urgency but persisting in attempts to substitute MSism for democratic practice is a diversion from what needs to be accomplished and a potentially dangerous substitution of values of privatization and interest based decision making for governance that is founded in a concern for the public good.
Gurstein's Community Informatics 
Richard Hill
October 20, 2014
Thank you for this excellent article. I have a quibble and a suggestion for a way forward.
The quibble is that you say “where the historical circumstances of Internet development – largely but not exclusively through multi-stakeholder processes”. You do go on to qualify this, but I think that it is important to recognize that, historically, Internet development and governance were not at all multi-stakeholder processes.
The Internet was developed and initially deployed by academics working under contract with the US Departement of Defence. It was later deployed by business interests, and civil society. ICANN was always intended to be business-led.
Civil society has not had any significant impact on Internet governance (despite its diligent attempts), and academia has not had any significant involvement or impact since many years.
The fact of the matter, as your article makes clear, is that the “multi-stakeholder model” is a slogan used to mask the dominance of business interests.
The way forward relates to points 1, 2 and 6 of your article. Some small first steps in those directions are outlined in the paper by Norbert Bellow and me that you can find at:
Click to access best_practices.pdf
Michael Gurstein
October 20, 2014
Hi Richard,
Thanks for this. As with any success there are multiple claims of parenthood. One of the more interesting is the role of civil society in the early development of the global Internet.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/10147/the-role-of-ngos-in-global-governance
This unfortunately seems to be behind a paywall and the original lecture at I believe it was, the University of London now seems to not be accessible. There is also a very interesting book by the same author, well-known British historian Peter Willets, with the same name outlining the role of GreenNet a very early NGO ISP (and a predecessor of APC) in the development of a global Internet.
M
michaelgraaf
October 20, 2014
This bears on the net neutrality debate. Corporations will try to govern internet in their interest, blocking or slowing encrypted and/or P2P traffic.
Michael Gurstein
October 20, 2014
Yes, and the multi-stakeholder model is one that directly enables them to do so. A problem with the MS model is that with each of the stakeholders pursuing their own sectional interests there is no way to ensure an outcome that is in the broad public interest.
billpks
October 20, 2014
Mike, thanks too from my companionable point of view.
While I agree that there is a global contest between Democracy and MSism, I want to suggest that even employing the term MSism cedes the debate-framing advantage to the forces of “legal piracy.”
Richard’s identification of MSism as a “slogan used to mask the dominance of business interests” is one that resonates strongly with me. MSism is a synonym for the other vile notion of our (USA) governance times “the Corporation as Person.”
We need to debate this from our own frame – that of emerging human capacity for equitable self-governance; the types that function apart from our pre-conscious, mammalian inheritance of purely limbic reactivity. What follows are thoughts about Framing and raising up a natural contrast to Legal Piracy.
More than anything else, from the perspective of human governance that preference for piracy is the domain of the elitist-corporate, hierarchical, green-field-forever, dogma of the Gilded Industrial Age. To the pirates, the Internet is simply new robotic tooling, a testimony to the superiority of the neo-liberal, Captains of Industry world view.
You note in your reply to Richard, “As with any success…” – there appears to be a supposition in the reference to “success” that the Internet, as we know it today, is principally an intentional artifact in the Linear-Sequential Newtonian/Cartesian sense of agency. I suggest that the natural Framing of the Internet is as an emergence along side the domains of chemistry and biology in the full electro-magnetic spectrum.
Predator corporatism is a distortion of the genuine value that industrialization has brought to humankind – MSism is not the natural tendency of mechanization; nor does the mere assertion of its legitimacy grant license for indefinite and insatiable plunder of ordinary working people – including the millions of honest business-persons.
The Legal Pirates, take the Randian stance (i.e. “you rate what you get away with.”); and from this unsubstantiated Frame they debate according to their dogma. Therein “marketing slogans are pablum for the serfs;” and that’s all there is to democratic discourse – “survival of the fittest” is all the evolutionary concept that Society ever needs.
MSism is fundamentalist imposition of zero-sum games on the 99% who are not among the Haves. We should avoid any language which dignifies this trope. This debate far predates the appearance of the Internet – we should pause before concluding we are some how in an entirely unprecedented domain of human affairs. That’s certainly not the way the Legal Pirates look at this situation.
As you point out, the debate here is largely being framed on one side to take as given the primacy of “stakeholding.” You and others are asking whether having the good fortune to hold a capital stake (be it of financial, human or constructed type) of some sort really entitles one to a fully compounded Civil Rights Leverage; not simply of access to the more narrowly conceived “Games of Financial Leverage” (in the pathological extreme – aka – Hunger Games Producer?)
There are those who take the Games of Financial Leverage to be synonymous with “capitalism” – I am not one of those. Piracy is the term I use for those narcissistic Game players for whom accumulation of ever more wealth signifies a serious mental health disorder. So what is the alternative view?
In broader human development arc, the Internet is an important chapter, but it is far from clear if, and how it will come to be seen as a disruptive innovation. Likely, it is also more than a matter of connectivity tooling the way the railroads or early wireless radio were.
If we were to consider the contemporary internet as the third electromagnetic emergence (after chemistry and biology) then it becomes a structured, natural domain apart from whatever intentional uses or tooling are invented out of it inherent structure (i.e. according to the known Laws of Thermodynamics in all likelihood).
Rather than an Internet of Things – which appears to conflate electronic devices with mechanically engineered ones, we get to an Internet of Electro-Magnetic Things (IEMT) a substrate of the “Whetherspace?” of human cognition, not simply the space of gizmos.
In the IEMT it seems that conventional diplomacy and the other inventions of modern democratic tending governance remain fully applicable. It also seems likely that the dynamics of Whetherspace are comparably Open, far-from-equilibrium bio-chemically mediated characteristics of the atmospheric Weatherscape against which we have been organizing our affairs since the dawn of consciousness.
The IEMT becomes a natural emergence in service of the whole of the consciousness experiment – not just a chunk of privately owned constructed capital. Thus ownership of the Internet makes no more sense than ownership of the Oxygen circulating in the atmosphere. The Mass of Opportunity can be seen as a Commons to be administered in Public Trust.
Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla
October 20, 2014
Multistakeholderism sounds like a formalisation of polyarchy, as Robert Dahl understood it. Basically accepting that running things is a process of recognizing those with interests in the outcome and allowing them to take decisions on their own interest. Of course, those with more resources tend to have the ability to influence the process in stronger and longer terms than those with diffuse or individual interests.
Michael Gurstein
October 20, 2014
Good point Eduardo. As I recall Dahl he was presenting models of how decisions are made rather than how they could or should be made so you second point about “who wins” with that model is certainly correct.
dgolumbia
October 21, 2014
i also think this is excellent, and I agree with many of your recommendations (and even more, with the problems you identify that require much more sustained discussion than they are getting). I’d want to push back just slightly on the very beginning: “Democracy at its simplest and most basic is governance by and for the people.” While this may be true in a literal sense, I don’t actually think this is what “democracy” means in our world as an aspirational value or a system of governance, nor does it point to the system of governance which most of us would want. The US, for example, was created as a democratic revision to a monarchical form of government, but was deliberately not a “democracy” in that sense. Rather, it was/is a constitutional republic. The three vital characteristics of this form of government are: 1) rule of law that is separate from any individual exercise of power; 2) the democratic election of governing representatives; and 3) separation of powers. Note that each of these mechanisms exist specifically to frustrate majority rule. I find that many of the best evocations of “democracy” in digital discussions confuse democracy with majority rule, and I think the problems in majority rule are well-established (even if people like James Madison had different objections to it than those we might have today). Without the 3 vital characteristics I’ve mentioned here, democracy fails to do what its ideals suggest. The lack of fine-grained discussion about political forms in internet governance circles disturbs me a great deal, as it can only exacerbate the problems that Richard and others have rightly mentioned. (You are very clearly not making this mistake, as the rest of the piece shows, & I hope people read the whole thing.) Rule of law, in particular, especially under constitutions, comes under a great deal of fire in many of the wilder forms of participatory & direct democracy, and rule of law might be the most important characteristic of the three: and what is so important about it is that rule of law is supposed to be able to trump popular will, as contrary to “democracy” as that sounds. I’m not suggesting that we can’t come up with new models, by any means: I am suggesting that many who advocate these forms do not seem to have a firm grip on the current model, and the new models end up (perhaps by accident) many of the most important features of the current ones, which I find a recipe for even more disaster than we have. Especially since, without rule of law, what you get is the most powerful and richest having even more power, just as Richard says.
Michael Gurstein
October 21, 2014
Thanks David and also for your very acute and useful comments/questions.
As I was composing the blogpost I thought quite long about the issue you are posing—almost all of the definitions I looked at for “democracy” has one form or another of the three characteristics that you point to as part of the definition.
I chose not to include “the rule of law”, “elections/representation” or “separation of powers” for several reasons.
1. I wanted my argument and position to be as simple and clear as possible. There is I think, currently, significant attempts from various directions to fuzzify the issues and create some conceptual space for what I consider to be the internally contradictory position of a “democratic multi-stakeholderism”. To my mind democracy and MSism are contrary and competing systems of governance and trying to merge or conflate them somehow is I think, to give away too much (from the position of those who support democracy) while gaining nothing. Many of those supporting DMSism are for a variety of reasons quite uncomfortable being associated with an explicit rejection of democratic practice and values and would prefer to hide this dereliction behind one euphemism or another. My strong preference is to have the issue out in the open and presented as clearly and unambiguously as possible—i.e. who is for democratic governance in the public interest and who is for governance by and for “stakeholders”.
2. I’m not sure that I agree that these additional elements should be included in the definition. It seems to me that they are to a considerable degree of their historical time and place (particularly the issues of “representation” and “separation of powers”) i.e. 17th/18th century landholding pre-industrial bourgeois societies and are increasingly the source of more problems in the operation of effective governance than providing useful safeguards. I think if one approaches the question of governance by the people and for the people from a less western individualist perspective one might want to have other ways of extending/operationalizing the definition.
3. I agree about the necessity of the “rule of law” as ensuring the probity of democratic practice but I would rather rephrase this as noting that democratic practice must be rule governed and to bring the issue of the creation (and enforcement of those “rules”) out of issues of constitutions, formal legalities and specific types of representative systems for law making.
4. I really do think that things have changed with Information and Communications Technologies with respect to the opportunities and risks (and the perception and experience of those opportunities and risks) for democratic practice particularly for “representation”, “transparency” and “accountability” and our challenge is to figure out how to operationalize these as fundamental democratic principle(s) in our new age including having these provide the kind of necessary checks and balances that your 3 elements were designed to achieve. There are various strategies being developed – with varying degrees of success (and various in-built limitations) of the Liquid Democracy, MySociety, online Petitioning, transparent budgeting, etc.etc. variety that I think we should be looking at very carefully and beginning to include in our processes (including as countering those arguing for the necessity of MS type processes for stakeholder inclusion…
Thanks again for moving the discussion forward.
Mike
Richard Hill
October 21, 2014
I much appreciate David’s excellent comments, and I would add one more item that, in my view, is essential for democracy: (4) respect for human rights. I realize that this may be included in the rule of law, but I think that it is better to make it a separate point. Respect for human rights is what protects minorities. And that is an essential element of what I think a democracy should be.
Daniel Pimienta
October 22, 2014
A provocative and extremely sensitive thread you have open Mike. I wonder if the problem is not with MSism nor with Governance… but with the association of the two terms. Multi-Stakeholder processes are extremely appropriate approaches for complex problem solving (complex in the sense of involving many parties with different visions or interests) in the context of Information Society (and probably in many other fields). There are good examples of the usefulness of those processes in the creation of Information Society National Strategies. By putting in constructivist interaction the “key people” with interest and knowledge on the matter they allow to focus efficiently on the issues and acknowledge the diversity of focuses, thus allowing strong and conclusive progress, if the rule of the process are fairly set and respected. This problem solving is NOT a governance matter; definitively it could be a useful first step to pave the ground for governance process; but it is NOT itself a governance process. An efficient MS process could bring to a government a sound basis to start a democratic consultation or process and enter into governance matters but to confuse expert (that what are key stakeholders) constructivism with people implication in decision (that what democracy is about) is a dangerous error of optics which could create some dangerous mirages (false paradigms) or serve as smoke for hidden agenda. If we leave to MSism the important place it deserves as a magnificent method for problem solving and avoid confusing it with democracy we could make productive use of it. If we pretend this is the new paradigm for governance we are bluffing ourselves and the others.
And by the way, if there is a matter which would deserve much more energy and experiments because of the promises it holds it is Participative Democracy.
The fact that the IGF process, in spite of being conducted by Internet experts is so poor in terms of distance participation processes (and here I am not talking about synchronous video sharing but genuine asynchronous methodologies for distance participation) is a highly significant indicator of the lack of democratic value of this process and the incongruity of pretending associate the world governance with the stakeholders mechanics put in place.
Michael Gurstein
October 22, 2014
Thanks for this Daniel and I agree completely with everything that you say including re:the value of MS processes as facilitating effective multi-sectoral consultation processes in advance of democratic decision making. And, as you probably know I’ve been arguing this position in many earlier blogposts on this issue. The point of this blogpost was to start from the beginning i.e. what is the fundamental basis from which we want/need to proceed in these (Internet and other) governance processes.
The discussion in the IG area has for the most part started from how to resolve/respond to specific issues where the response/solution almost inevitably (and for the reasons you point to) evoke MSism as a most effective way to proceed (and of course being very fuzzy/ambiguous about whether one is discussing consultation processes or decision making process). I thought it might be worthwhile to start from the other end and try to go back to the basics of what models we are promoting as fundamental platforms for our decision making processes going forward–democracy or multi-stakeholderism.