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156 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
a communication rights approach that attempts to balance claims for
recognition (freedom of expression, right to communicate and pluralistic
media) with claims for redistribution (promoting community/citizen’s
ownership and control of media and communication resources).
We are arguing that the institutional limits of the WSIS explain why
a narrow set of claims for recognition displaced wider claims for both
recognition and redistribution as outlined in the Civil Society Declaration.
Specifically, claims to protect communication rights and freedom
of expression succeeded in securing ‘transcultural resonance’ as the issue
positioned civil society against Southern states – in this case with
the support of many Northern states. Once again, we return to the issue
of representation and accountability of civil society to citizens. Beatriz
Busaniche (2005), a Free Software activist from Argentina argued that
the centralization of the Civil Society Bureau (CSB) and its focus on a
coherent but ultimately watered-down voice in presenting an Alternate
Civil Society Declaration diminished the capacity of delegates to intervene
in politically charged negotiations with dominant stakeholders (49).
Busaniche (2005) argues that participating CSOs ‘should not pretend
to represent anyone except their own organizations’ and that ‘citizenry
should be the basis of participation’ (51). Echoing these sentiments, a
number of international activists and researchers involved in and at the
margins of the WSIS process formed the innovative Incommunicado
Project in 2005 – ‘refusing to allow an organizational incorporation of
grassroots or subaltern agendas into the managed consensus being built
around the dynamic of an “international civil (information) society” ’ (see:
http://incommunicado.info/conference).
This line of criticism challenges the arguments made earlier about the
lack of expertise and resources alone explaining the relative absence of
civil society voices from the South. It becomes important in this context to
consider the conceptual and historical role of civil society organizations –
especially in the form of NGOs in the South since the 1980s. Table 6.1
provides a vivid picture of some of the new inconsistencies of ‘splintered
urbanism’ that makes up the new geography of globalization. In this
case, we see that network practices of NGOs sometimes in line, but
often out of synch with the integration of cities in the global economy (as
measured by the presence of TNCs). 12 The table shows that the density of
transnational NGO presence is actually higher in the South as compared
to the North.
If we take into account the fact that Nairobi, New Delhi, Manila,
Mexico City and Beijing (among other Third World cities) make up
the top twenty-five rankings of the highest NGO-networked global
cities, then we must reconceptualize the relationship between democratic