Understanding WSIS: An Institutional Analysis of the UN World Summit on the Information Society

The Cold War’s end stimulated new interest in a long-standing UN institution: the World Summit. World summits are one-time conferences organized by the UN to address global issues such as environment, housing, or food. They involve thousands of policy makers working together over several years to develop consensual visions of principles and possible solutions to some of humankind’s most challenging problems. Since the Earth Summit of 1992 and counting the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) of 2003/2005, the UN has hosted almost one Summit per year for 11 years. World summits are dogged by a fundamental question: what are they good for? Do they produce social and political change commensurate with their enormous cost in money and policy makers’ time? True, at least one world summit has yielded a major result: the 1992 Earth Summit produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that led to national commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Other summits, however, have not had such clear-cut results. The question remains: is a world summit a vehicle for meaningful social and political change? In what follows, I propose a conceptual framework for addressing this question, and I apply it to WSIS. From that analysis, I conclude that summits can make a signiacant contribution to social change. Summits present opportunities, making valuable resources available for political advocacy. However, they are just one element needed for change; also needed are candidate policies that at those opportunities and policy advocates with the inouence to realize those opportunities. When all those elements come together, signiacant results can be achieved. Evidence of summits’ power can be seen in the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which challenged the global Internet governance regime.