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CONCLUSION 177
in the area of Internet Governance and the opportunity for CSOs to create
new networks of social activism in the ICT area, the real limitations of
the heavily centralized and bureaucratized process of civil society engagement
in the WSIS must also be acknowledged. Specifically, we focused
on the ways in which narrow claims for recognition in the area of freedom
of information displaced both more expansive claims for recognition of
community rights as well as meaningful claims for redistribution. It is in
this light that we must question the legitimacy of CSOs as the representative
voice of public interest in the field of global communications policy
especially as private capital adeptly masters the discourse of sustainable
and multicultural info-development.
The last section of Chapter 6 examined gender advocacy within the
WSIS to contend that the Gender Caucus can be seen as a site of progressive
institutional engagement, offering some lessons for researchers
and activists in the field of global communications policy. First and foremost,
feminist advocacy within the WSIS process formulated redistributive
claims over appropriate technology and ICT access through claims
for recognition marked by difference based primarily but not exclusively
on gender. This framing of questions of access around identity resonates
with wider publics because it explicitly situates the technocratic terms of
the debate in a wider political and cultural context. Secondly, the Gender
Caucus, especially through its regional meetings, was a site of open discussions
about representation within transnational civil society, and the
difficult but necessary need to balance the articulation of universal values
like human rights with attention to difference. Within feminist theory
and practice, this has not led to the abandonment of core universal values
or emancipatory visions for change, but it has led to greater attention to
cultural practice and historical difference.
These lessons provide an important template for communications policy
scholars and activists engaged in the implementation and follow-up
stages of the WSIS process, and well beyond. 2
Notes
1. One area within the field of global communications policy that deserves
much more discussion than has been possible in this text is intellectual
property rights regimes and the oppositional social movements
around open-source software platforms and alternatives such as creative
commons licenses for digital content (Lessig 2004; Vaidyanathan
2001). We feel that our larger conceptual framework offering a historical
and culturally grounded critique holds true, while this added
empirical focus would open up a variety of new questions for debate