Discourse Coalitions in Internet Governance: Shaping Global Policy by Narratives and Definitions

Abstract

Internet Governance is emerging as a new, important global policy domain. Within this domain, crucial clusters of issues are debated and addressed through multi-layered and heterogeneous processes, whose complexity challenges the effectiveness of policy-making as well as diplomatic action. Notwithstanding the relevance of these issues, there is a total lack of consensus about how to define Internet Governance, and an ample margin of ambiguity regarding both the concept of governance and the technical "boundaries" of the Internet. This uncertainty depends on the highly controversial nature of the issues at stake. Since the early 1990s, in fact, different actors have strategically been producing different definitions of Internet Governance, in order to mark off sets of legitimated issues, actors and fora. In other words, definitions have been used as regulative resources activated by actors in their struggle for the governance of the Internet. For this reason, they represent traces of a power struggle that can be analysed through written documents, in order to outline policy and diplomatic strategies. This paper investigates such definitional struggle during Internet governance negotiations and multistakeholder dialogue. In the first part, combining Hajer’s methodology of discourse analysis with the narrative policy analysis approach, authors present a historical reconstruction of different Internet Governance problematics (what is the main goal of Internet Governance? Is Internet Governance itself a problem? Why?). Four main discourse coalitions in the Internet Governance ecosystem are identified: 1) a neoliberal coalition, led by the US government and industry; 2) a sovereigntist coalition, led by the Russian and Chinese governments; 3) a constitutional coalition which gathers several civil society associations and International Organisations; and 4) a developmentist coalition, composed by some developing countries that conceive the Internet just as a tool for development. In the second part of the paper, categories previously developed are used in order to map the effective composition of coalitions in the context of the World Summit on Information Society +10 (WSIS+10) review process in 2015, a focal point of conflict in the Internet Governance global arena. A content analysis of documents presented in five different stages of the WSIS+10 review process is applied in order to shed light on the process by which actors coalesce around common narratives and eventually produce discursive orders.