Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

146 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
governance is ‘no longer the sole domain of governments’ but rather ‘a
laboratory which develops innovative models and mechanisms for a new
global diplomacy’ (Kleinwächter 2004b). Today, multilateral institutions
are increasingly expanding formal and informal modes of participation for
civil society organizations (CSOs), 1 often with the expectation that these
groups representing the interests of citizens will raise humanitarian and
welfare concerns, thereby acting as a check on the balance of power held
firmly by state and corporate actors. This trend is in many ways a response
by multilateral institutions to the legitimacy crisis of the ‘governance
of governance’ (Keohane 2002), when the WTO, the World Bank and
the IMF, as well as the ITU and WIPO face opposition from multiple
publics across the North–South divide. In mounting these challenges,
access to new communications technologies, most obviously the Internet,
is now seen as playing a pivotal role in sustaining effective transnational
mobilizations, fostering novel modes of community and identity that
support new theories of collective action (Castells 2003). The presence
of a wide range of civil society representatives has become a prominent
feature of international summitry since the 1990s, with the practice of
parallel independent civil society forums often serving as a moral check
to the official process of meetings by state officials. 2
The ‘post-Washington Consensus’ thus follows two decades of sustained
opposition, challenging austerity programmes in the South, responding
to mass mobilization against trade agreements in the North
and attempts to create coherence amidst the complex alliances that make
up a sense of ‘globalization from below’ through transnational political
experiments such as the World Social Forum (WSF). Despite these signs
of opposition to the dominant discourse of neoliberal trade, the concept
of a global civil society is in practice a murkier and much more contradictory
category than the ‘purist’ counter-hegemonic picture of local
social movements effectively and legitimately challenging from below the
forces of global capitalism from above (Chandhoke 2001; Keane 2003:
57). Critics also caution against the overly optimistic reading of ICTs
as transformative of the substance of political engagement by civil society
(Sassen 2002: 3). Feminist analysts have been particularly vigilant
about the complexities of transnational social movements and networks,
pointing out that there is significant heterogeneity under the umbrella
of global civil society. They vary in terms of structure and organizational
form, depending on funding, scope of activity and access to institutional
power and embody differences in political objectives between nationally
based social movements and international non-governmental organizations
(INGOs) and transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink
1998; Naples and Desai 2002). The political orientations of civil society