IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/telpol/v45y2021i6s0308596121000458.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

What is civil society and who represents civil society at the IGF? An analysis of civil society typologies in internet governance

Author

Listed:
  • Tjahja, Nadia
  • Meyer, Trisha
  • Shahin, Jamal

Abstract

For 15 years, the UN-mandated Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has brought different stakeholder groups together to engage in debate and discussion on public policy issues relevant to Internet Governance, but who are the ‘civil society’ that is treated as one of the cornerstones of the IGF? This paper aims to provide two contributions to discussions on norm entrepreneurship in internet governance. First, it aims to contribute to the growing body of literature on multistakeholderism, notably by furthering debates on the role of civil society in institutions of global governance (in this instance, the IGF). Second, we aim to contribute to the debates on the future of the IGF(+), by digging into the civil society stakeholder group to try to understand who is actually present in the discussions. By creating a typology of the 2830 Civil Society Organisations that have participated in IGFs between 2006 and 2019, we provide nuance to the heterogeneity of civil society in Internet Governance debates. This exploratory study has shown that there is a hidden wealth available in the statistics of the IGF that can inform our policymaking capacity in terms of topics, representation but also providing access and ensuring outreach to specific communities.

Suggested Citation

  • Tjahja, Nadia & Meyer, Trisha & Shahin, Jamal, 2021. "What is civil society and who represents civil society at the IGF? An analysis of civil society typologies in internet governance," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(6).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:telpol:v:45:y:2021:i:6:s0308596121000458
    DOI: 10.1016/j.telpol.2021.102141
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308596121000458
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.telpol.2021.102141?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tjahja, Nadia & Potjomkina, Diana, 2024. "An agent of change: Youth meta-participation at the internet governance forum," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(5).
    2. Radu, Roxana & Kettemann, Matthias C. & Meyer, Trisha & Shahin, Jamal, 2021. "Normfare: Norm entrepreneurship in internet governance," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(6).
    3. Tjahja, Nadia & Meyer, Trisha & Shahin, Jamal, 2022. "Who do you think you are? Individual stakeholder identification and mobility at the Internet Governance Forum," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(10).
    4. Trithara, Dakoda, 2024. "Agents of platform governance: Analyzing U.S. civil society's role in contesting online content moderation," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(4).
    5. Grover, Rohan, 2022. "The geopolitics of digital rights activism: Evaluating civil society's role in the promises of multistakeholder internet governance," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(10).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:telpol:v:45:y:2021:i:6:s0308596121000458. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30471/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.