On 17 May 2011, the Media Change and Innovation Division hosted a workshop at the International Labor Organization, a United Nations body located in Geneva. Entitled, «Institutional Choice in Global Communications Governance,» it was held in the context of the WSIS Forum, an annual four-day conference convened to take stock of progress made in implementing the agreements reached during the 2002-2005 World Summit on the Information Society negotiations.

The workshop was organized and moderated by the division’s International Fellow, Dr. William J. Drake, and featured a panel of expert speakers that included the division’s Chair, Prof. Michael Latzer. Other speakers included representatives of global civil society, the Internet technical community, and the governments of Switzerland, Brazil, and Egypt. About sixty people attended the event in person, while others from around the world participated remotely via the Internet.

The purpose of the workshop was to promote dialogue between policy analysts and practitioners about the design and selection of global governance arrangements for information and communication technology (ICT). The contemporary global communi-cations order has been marked by a significant increase in the number and variety of these arrangements, which vary greatly in terms of the collective action problems they address and the institutional attributes they possess. This proliferation raises a number of challenging problems like, how do we evaluate the relative political feasibility and functional effectiveness of alternatives approaches in relation to specific global policy challenges? What are their respective strengths and weaknesses? How well do such mechanisms cohere into an effective global governance architecture? The workshop explored these and related questions in relation to current policy challenges concerning the global Internet in particular.

Find documentation on the workshop bellow: