Later this month (September 2024), the United Nations (UN) will discuss and almost certainly agree three documents at what it’s called the Summit of the Future: an overarching Pact for the Future, a Declaration on Future Generations, and a Global Digital Compact (or GDC). The links will take you to the latest drafts.
What are these documents, what do they entail, and what links them to the 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that will follow next year?
Some full disclosure here. I’m working on that 20-year review for one of the UN agencies that’s most involved: the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD). It will prepare a substantial report on what’s happened over the years since the first Summit in 2003 (the second was in 2005), and on the implications for the WSIS vision of technological developments since then and now in progress.
Summit, pact and compact
These texts have not come out of nowhere.
The GDC draws on years of discussions on ‘digital cooperation’ that were initiated by the UN Secretary-General more than five years back.
The Pact will be the outcome of a larger but more recent initiative, also the Secretary-General’s, to revitalise the UN’s role and make it fitter for the challenges posed by the 21st century, not least AI and climate change.
Reaching agreement
Like all UN agreements, these texts are going to be finalised through tortuous negotiation, multiple drafts, interminable-seeming language tweaks, compromise and ambiguity.
That was also true of the WSIS agreements 20 years ago.
Like all UN agreements, they will be agreed by governments. The role of other stakeholders in UN negotiations has grown in recent years – something WSIS pioneered – and there’ve been opportunities for input, some formal (and less interesting), some informal (and more influential), but it will be governments that finalise the texts.
That was also true of WSIS.
Most UN agreements are heavily contested as they’re drafted and negotiated. There’s a round of applause once they’re agreed and then, typically, they become established norms to be defended, even by those who were unhappy with the compromise.
That was true of WSIS too.
The UN’s role…
There’s been a deal of sniping at these new UN initiatives, so it’s worth putting them in context.
The sniping’s come from different directions within the digital community, particularly where the Digital Compact’s concerned.
Some see them as threatening the multistakeholder character of other digital discussions – and/or the deregulated environment in which digital technology and business have developed: as ‘a power grab by the UN’ which will reduce the private sector’s, technical community’s or civil society’s influence on outcomes. An example here.
These critics are particularly exercised about new initiatives or institutions proposed within the drafts, for instance to address the challenge of AI.
But others see the texts as failing to go far enough in dealing with the challenges of poverty, conflict and technological advance: as failing to challenge the inequalities of today’s digital environment, which gives great power to a small number of governments and businesses. For instance here.
…in context…
Many of these criticisms, especially the former, look at these draft documents – and the initiatives from which they stem – from a digital insider’s viewpoint: what it might mean for the digital sector rather than what the digital sector might mean for global society. That, it seems to me, is a mistake.
Digitalisation’s no longer the add-on to international political and economic life it was back at the time of WSIS. Today it’s fundamental to the direction of all aspects of global society: a point forcefully made by several contributors to APC’s recent GISWatch special edition that looks at WSIS’ 20-year review.
The Secretary-General’s initiatives place digital development(s) within the much broader context of a world that’s facing massive challenges: conflict, poverty and inequality; unstable power structures in geopolitics and global economics; climate change and environmental degradation; the risk of new pandemics; lack of progress towards full achievement of the internationally-agreed Sustainable Development Goals. These are the issues for the Summit and the Pact.
The UN’s structures, designed after the Second World War, the Secretary-General feels, need modernising if they’re to cope with these transforming (and potentially existential) issues. The precedent of an overarching global body that fails to manage changing circumstances – the failure of the League of Nations – is, after all, a far from happy one.
New technology – not just digital but in other areas of innovation too – can’t be divorced from these crises, in terms of either opportunity or risk. It’s intrinsic to the future.
The notion that the UN should be marginal to digital discussions is not sustainable. Partly because its impact cuts across the UN’s mandate (as is the case with sustainable development or climate change or human rights). And because it’s where less powerful governments feel they can overcome the marginalisation that affects their countries in other global decision-making contexts.
…which suggests…
The Global Digital Compact needs to be seen within the larger context of the Summit and Pact for the Future, in short, rather than as an isolated document that is just concerned with digital issues.
That larger project sees digitalisation – and explicitly challenges such as digital inequality, data governance, cybersecurity, the threat of cyber warfare – within a global context of geopolitical dysfunction, environmental degradation and development that has become both unsustainable and insufficient.
It sees the opportunities and risks that arise from digitalisation within this broader context because they’re intrinsic to it and inextricable therefrom. Mainstreaming digitalisation doesn’t just entail including digitalisation within other spheres of policy development (political, economic, environmental, concerned with rights, development or conflict) but also including those other spheres of policy within digital policy development.
That should be seen as an achievement by the digital community rather than a threat to it – but it requires fresh thinking on its part.
What ‘mainstreaming’ entails
A key element for engaging constructively with it, for digital insiders, is learning to look at digital development from the outside rather than the inside: to consider it from the perspective of those whose primary concern is with, say, economic development or environmental sustainability, rather than prioritising technological development or maximising digital business opportunities.
I’ll make six points that I think follow on from this. Aspects of these are discussed in several reports of APC’s GISWatch edition, and in the UN drafts.
The first is to acknowledge that digitalisation can’t be considered in isolation from its impacts. Impacts on (say) the environment, employment and other human rights should be integral to public policy debate on digital development, and to business and technical decision making. Policies, standards, norms and regulations should be influenced by those impacts alongside technical considerations.
Second, as well as positive impacts, we’ve come to understand we need to deal with adverse impacts. Things haven’t always turned out as we hoped, nor will they do so in future.
Rapid innovation has tended to increase inequalities within society, rather than enhance equality (as discussed, for instance, by Alison Gillwald in GISWatch). Increased freedom of information and expression has been accompanied by increased mis- and disinformation and abuse. Rapid growth in data has facilitated the loss of privacy and more surveillance. Electronic waste and increased energy consumption are contributing to climate change and a range of other harms. These things are not susceptible to purely technological solutions.
Third, dealing with this requires greater diversity of stakeholder engagement. Digital policy doesn’t belong to digital insiders, but to the whole global community. Multistakeholder engagement needs to reach much more substantially beyond digital insiders if it is to be sustainable. Technologists, as well as governments, should avoid thinking/saying they know best.
Fourth, it requires more serious rebalancing of the relationship between multilateral and multistakeholder approaches. Too many on both sides see these as adversarial, often with their vested interests in mind. They need to work together, which requires listening, consensus building, compromise. Sustainable digital development needs international agreements – whether WSIS or the GDC – as much as human rights or climate change.
Fifth, it requires more global inclusion. Different countries have different contexts, circumstances and requirements. Digital development today is dominated by businesses and markets in developed and technologically-advanced developing countries, especially the United States and China.
Sustainable global development, across the board, requires more engagement and influence from other developing countries, including least developed and small island states, because their interests don’t (necessarily or often) coincide with those of powerful or dominant players in digitalisation. This won’t happen without international dialogue.
And sixthly, all of this requires institutional innovation, including regulation. Many digital insiders have been hostile to changes in institutional frameworks they think have served them well, or to the introduction of new institutions on the grounds that they might not do so. But ways of doing things that worked in the past don’t always work that well when circumstances change.
Technological innovation requires institutional innovation because rules that governed what was possible in the past don’t deal with what is possible today or in the future. That’s precisely why the institutional innovations made at WSIS – including multistakeholder engagement – were significant. And institutional innovation’s also needed to include the interests of other stakeholders and issues that are now critically important, such as the environment.
What about WSIS+20
What’s the relationship between this and the 20-year review of WSIS?
Reviewing WSIS in depth – as intended by CSTD (see above) and other bodies, in and beyond the UN system – provides an opportunity to review successes and failures of the past, consider what we’ve learnt and where that’s brought us now, focus on new and more complex priorities and look towards a future with its new anxieties and opportunities.
The new texts that are to be discussed this month will obviously set a framework within which the review will be considered – both by those bodies and, particularly, by the UN General Assembly when it addresses the review in 2025.
The draft GDC, in particular, sees the WSIS review as a way “to identify how WSIS processes can support implementation of the Compact.” That will clearly be a major part of that General Assembly’s review.
The work of other agencies before then is to provide evidence for that, building on the very substantial work that has been done to date within and beyond the UN system, and on input from different stakeholders. The more analysis and understanding it includes, the better.
Cover image via UNGeneva on X.
David Souter writes a fortnightly column for APC, looking at different aspects of the information society, development and rights. David’s pieces take a fresh look at many of the issues that concern APC and its members, with the aim of provoking discussion and debate. Issues covered include internet governance and sustainable development, human rights and the environment, policy, practice and the use of ICTs by individuals and communities.