CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE WORLD SUMMIT ON THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

I have not posted any comments on the WSIS. Frankly, I am not a big fan of these conferences. The last “big do”, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, gathered tens of thousands of people in South Africa, and I could not help but wonder if more good would not have been done by these folk using their time and money to actually do something for sustainable development, rather than talk about it. There is a famous poem, The Development Game, from a few decades ago that has lines about development experts flocking to luxury hotels to discuss homelessness, and banqueting at expensive restaurants while discussing hunger.

My most intensive experience with one of these was with the United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development in 1979. It seemed to me to be a disaster, exacerbating the hard feelings between rich and poor countries. Still, the Rio Summit seems to me really to have changed peoples attitudes, and been constructive in bringing environmental concerns more fully into the consciousness of development professionals, leading to real programs, policies, and capacity building efforts.

Still, I was concerned with this article by Steven Long, that suggests that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) may walk out of the WSIS. This follows what seems to be their not very constructive actions at the Cancun summit of the WTO.