Democratizing Global Communication? Global Civil Society and the Campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society

This 30-page paper in the International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), p. 267-296, opens with the question of what democracy means at the international level. It states that a benchmark might include: communicating preferences to leadership, insuring equal voice with leadership, and removing leaders who fail to act on behalf of those they represent. It seeks an answer through a case study of the role of transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and multi-stakeholder (MuSH) governance processes in the formation of international communication-information policy, claiming that these represent default solutions to democratisation of international institutions.

It analyses the Campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of multi-stakeholder governance as revealed by the need of the UN system to institutionalise civil society participation in WSIS. As stated in the article: "The CRIS Campaign’s struggle to shape global norms by mobilizing civil society actors... reflects a long-term attempt to formulate and apply an overarching ideology... to guide policy advocacy, an ideology that originated with communication scholars and which attempted to put exalted concepts of the social role of communication at the center of policy development." It documents the role of the CRIS campaign in determining the norms and modalities of civil society participation in WSIS, and provides a critical assessment of the ideology of "communication rights."

According to this research, using social network analysis (SNA) data, the CRIS effort was unsuccessful but holds lessons on the relationship between communication studies and public policy and offers insight into communication policy advocacy and mobilisation of constituencies across borders. For example, SNA data reveal the centrality of CRIS affiliate Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in WSIS civil society, and the paper explains that centrality in terms of its organisational capacity to link multiple issue networks. It is a demonstration of the relationship between transnational advocacy and international institutions, revealing the interdependence of the needs of international institutions for legitimacy and participation and the needs and incentives of advocacy groups.

In conclusion, the authors state that the phrase “right to communicate” was controversial enough to hamper the CRIS effort, though they claim that as a mobilising frame, this and similarly-derived language did help build advocacy networks when separated from links to theory and a history of previous efforts. However, as stated here, it was the coupling of organisational capacity, in this case, of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), to the concept of a WSIS-centered campaign that had the most success in coordinating and connecting civil society in this case. The APC, because of its scope on internet governance issues, was central and influential in the debates at the WSIS conference. CRIS successes, as enumerated here, include mobilising to influence norms that may indicate future policy direction, advancing MuSH participation in governance giving civil society a peer status with institutions, and keeping active thematic groups and caucuses. The authors cite drawbacks and unresolved issues in MuSH governance including self-selection by NGOs claiming representation of societal sectors, dominance of the global North because it has the resources to represent global South sectors, and questions of global effectiveness of the mechanisms to facilitate the breadth of deliberation on preferences, norms and rules, and representation.