Leadership panel roundtable

Event report

The purpose of this session was to introduce the United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) inaugural Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Leadership Panel to stakeholders, and invite questions and suggestions. The panel was appointed by the UN Secretary-General in August 2022 to support and enhance the work of the IGF, to support high-level stakeholder engagement in the IGF, to get more people to participate, to support fundraising for the IGF, to provide strategic input and advice on the IGF to the Secretary-General, and to promote the IGF and its outputs.

The High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation panel recommended three models of governance, of digital cooperation of which the IGF+ has been taken forward and the Leadership Panel is a concrete manifestation of the implementation of the IGF + vision. It recognises the importance of the multistakeholder IGF, and endeavours to bring more attention, more prominence, more funding, and more connectivity to the IGF community.

The IGF is a venue for open and inclusive multistakeholder discussion. Its non-binding outcomes provide a safe place for stakeholders to test new ideas and unveil potential solutions. However, awareness and importance of the IGF remains inadequate outside the internet governance community.

The best way the IGF can be elevated is to help to transform and transmit the things that it has discovered in the course of its discussions and deliberations into actionable policy recommendations. The IGF community should aim for the IGF to have a global status similar to that of COP events, such that all major news media and people in the world are aware it is happening. It was noted that the MAG and the panel should work together to define success for the IGF, define tangible outputs, and what problem the outputs are intended to address in the field of internet governance. This would help narrow down the intended outputs and help identify where the IGF can bring the unique voice of the global multistakeholder community. 

The Leadership Panel and other intersessional IGF working groups, like Dynamic Coalitions (DC), can work together. DCs can come up with stronger use cases that will give the Panel’s deliberations a more concrete basis and thus give them credibility. 

The panellists suggested that stakeholders can hold the Panel accountable and engage with them regularly to ensure transparency in their work and progress.

By Mili Semlani

The session in keywords