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CIVIL SOCIETY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 163
the issues at stake. Feminist critics within the WSIS process argue that
social actors engaged in the policy-making field often fail to recognize
the reality of the politics of communication policy, especially in the case
of the developing world where the stakes of the IS debate are perhaps the
highest and civil society participation the weakest.
The slippery slope in most postcolonial societies between the state and
civil society has to be taken into account when we consider the MacBride
legacy and the issue of representation in multilateral governance. Instead,
as discussions in the Gender Caucus advocate most strongly, there is a
need to reconsider policy priorities based on social practice. This means
that instead of finding or funding CSOs based in the South to carry out
policies meant to close the ‘digital divide’, there is a need to learn from
how civil society organizations, state bodies and even informal networks
that have less institutional power, approach claims arising from communication
concerns.
As we saw in Chapter 5, technology is projected as a determining factor
in debates about the IS, as neutral. A driving force in policy-making
but also an object and objective, it serves as the normative framing of
political economic decisions, it bears the ‘metadata’ for the redefinition
of social problems – such as the renaming of inequalities into ‘digital
divide’. Communication policy tends to celebrate the ‘changing’ effect
that technology has upon the social world, but it largely concentrates on
a limited range of questions. In terms of the digital divide, the questions
have focused almost exclusively on ICTs and skills to enable access and use
(or consumption) of ICTs and related products but they tend to avoid the
structural dimensions of poverty and prioritization of uses of technologies
or political and cultural practices that perpetuate structural and symbolic
inequity. These latter concerns are often seen by the majority of policymakers
as outside the legitimate scope of communication policy.
In stark contrast, feminist activists have been some of the loudest critics
within the WSIS process of the ‘market fundamentalism’ inherent
in global and national ICT policy where ‘pro-poor’ interventions can
only be justified through ‘pro-market’ solutions (Gurumurthy 2005b).
Feminist advocates from the South argued persistently for the need to
prioritize productive capacities of ICTs over the consumption of ICT
services in the developing world, especially because of the impact that
they might have on marginalized communities.
On the issue of ICTs, globalization and the feminization of work, feminist
scholarship has emphasized that any policy debate must include the
perspective of actual and potential workers from the South as opposed to
the predominant focus on experiences of displaced white-collar workers
in the North (Chakravartty 2005; Ng and Mitter 2005a; Freeman 2000).