Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

6 Civil society and
social justice: the limits
and possibilities of
global governance
Global Communication Policy regime: insert
‘public’ – press ‘Enter’
In the previous chapter we examined the competing logics behind the
normative framework of the emerging information society as produced
through alliances between private and public social actors representing
interests in both the US and the EU. Although we identified two competing
visions of IS, we showed how one coherent dominant discourse
of the neoliberal IS emerged by the close of the twentieth century. We
demonstrated the profound shortcomings of the dominant neoliberal IS
policy discourse by highlighting the unevenness of access and narrowness
of vision. We showed how civil society organizations have led the charge
for equity in this process and have proposed a competing and democratic
vision for change embodied in the WSIS Civil Society declaration (Civil
Society Statement 2005). In this chapter, we explore the role of civil
society as a new social actor in the shifting field of global communication
policy, by taking a closer look at the novel institutional context of the
WSIS. The space for civil society participation – however limited –
allows new social actors outside state and corporate interests to raise
claims about redistribution and recognition while negotiating the issue of
legitimate representation. This chapter examines both the institutional
constraints as well as the discursive parameters of this process.
We focus on civil society because of its expanded symbolic power to
shape normative debates in the field of communication policy. One of
the gains for civil society organizations at the first summit in Geneva in
2003 was the introduction of the language of ‘multistakeholderism’ in the
negotiating process, which led some participants to observe that global
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