Here is the edited document. (.doc attachment) as
fowarded by Partha
I will also cut and paste it to this message just in
case (text only; no formatting)
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Information Society in the Asia Pacific -
Is there Life beyond Infrastructure and Market
Competitiveness
A Civil Society's1 response to the 'Draft Regional
Action Plan Towards Information Society in Asia Pacific'
proposed to be adopted at the High Level Asia-Pacific
Conference for the WSIS
at Tehran from 31st May to 2nd June 2005
Asia Pacific is a region where 70 % of the world's poor
live, a point which is well made by the draft Regional
Action Plan proposed for adoption by the 'High Level
Asia-Pacific Conference for the WSIS' at Tehran, in
context of the fact that the regional processes in the
WSIS framework are expected to fine-tune the global
level WSIS processes to regional realities. The civil
society participating in the Tehran conference is
however alarmed that instead of taking a social equity
and inclusiveness based development agenda forward and
beyond the WSIS documents, the draft Regional Action
Plan (RAP) represents a retreat from both the WSIS
outcomes and the earlier Tokyo Declaration.
The draft RAP seems to forget or ignore the vision
stated in the Geneva Declaration of Principles,
"...to build a people-centred, inclusive and
development-oriented
Information Society, where everyone can create, access,
utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling
individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their
full potential in promoting their sustainable
development and improving their quality of life.."
.
What we see instead is a complete lack of a development
perspective and a preoccupation with technology and
business interests. The conference website lists its
main objective as to "share best practices of ICT
Development". The draft RAP also mostly uses the term
ICT development, and the term 'ICT for Development' is
hardly mentioned. It appears that these two terms are
taken to be un-problematicaly inter-changeable. WSIS is
about ICT for Development, and ICT development is only
one of the issues in ICT for Development.
The present draft is mostly driven by the limited vision
of - technology for markets, and markets for technology.
Economic competitiveness, jobs, and exports are crucial
for economic growth in the Asia Pacific but to equate
the WSIS process, and the Information Society agenda,
only with these issues is a travesty that civil society
cannot be associated with.
Though the draft RAP does not deal with these economic
issues at length, the nature of its engagement with
development issues shows a complete lack of commitment
to rise above the dominant paradigm of private sector
and business-interests driven ICT activity in most
countries of the Asia Pacific. This has resulted in a
document that speaks superficially about development,
meanders aimlessly saying little of significance, and
avoids making any substantive points.
The Asia Pacific civil society representatives would
like to appeal to the government delegates not to adopt
the Regional Action Plan in its present shape, and defer
the development and adoption of a regional action plan
to after Tunis. Meanwhile, this meeting can come up with
broad principles on regional cooperation for shaping a
development-oreinted Information Society in the Asia
Pacific, and on how WSIS implementation and follow-up
will take place.
To give a snapshot of what is wrong with the draft RAP
we give some examples here. However, a detailed analysis
of the action plan with respect to the WSIS mandate, to
the Tokyo Declaration, to other regional WSIS
documents - of Africa and the draft plan for LAC - and
most importantly, with respect to the regional realities
of the Asia Pacific region, has to be made separately.
The following comments therefore are illustrative and
not exhaustive of the civil society's response to the
draft RAP.
Role of government and all stakeholders in the promotion
of ICTs for development
The Regional Action Plan has almost completely ignored
the civil society when it speaks of 'all stakeholders'
and partnerships. It seems only to mean government-
private sector partnerships. In the tabulated plan,
under this Action Line, the RAP calls for 'private
sector to be engaged in concrete projects to develop the
Information Society' completely avoiding making even the
customary inclusion of the civil society in the
threesome that multistakeholderism has come to mean. And
the indicator for evaluating progress on the
multistakeholder principle in the RAP framework is
"Number of public-private, buyer-supplier (e.g.
e-chaupal of India) and such other partnerships."
This formula of seeing partnerships exclusively in a
public private framework is repeated at many other
places in the document. The role of the civil society in
policy making, capacity building, regional and global
cooperation, carrying out specific projects, stimulating
community processes, as well as in extracting
accountability from government and other players on
commitments, policy and practice is entirely discounted
by the draft RAP.
In this respect, the draft RAP goes completely against
the letter and spirit of the WSIS documents and can in
no way be considered to be taking the WSIS process
forward. The RAP also goes against its mandate given in
the Tokyo Declaration where the references to the civil
society and the private sector are relatively much more
balanced.
The exclusion of the legitimate role of civil society is
seen not only in the draft RAP, but has also been
expressed in action - in the manner that civil society
has mostly been excluded from the Asia -Pacific regional
WSIS processes. This has considerably downgraded the
achievements already made in the WSIS process for
multistakeholderism. (Civil society will separately take
up the issue of how it has been systematically excluded
from the Asia Pacific regional WSIS process.)
The effect of the exclusion of civil society from the
regional processes shows on the draft RAP document in
the way it runs roughshod over the development concerns
of the people of the Asia Pacific. There seems to be a
hurry to put together and carry through a document whose
main purpose appears to be to abstian from substantial
position on any issue. Such a document can hardly serve
as the basis of shaping an Information Society in the
Asia Pacific that the majoirty will find reasons to look
forward to.
In the absence of a good and effective roadmap, and
commitment of all stakeholders to implementing it, the
development of an Information Society in Asia Pacific
will follow the default route. Such a route will further
the interests of those already entrenched in a position
of greater social, economic and political power to the
detriment of the interests of those disadvantaged at
present. This is not the vision that the governments and
other stakeholders have committed to in the WSIS
process. An effective regional action plan for Asia
Pacific can only come out of a process that is open,
inclusive and transparent, and involves fully the
participation of all stakeholders. This has not at all
been true of the present Asia Pacific regional process.
Information and Communication Infrastructure
The tabulated part of the draft RAP speaks of the need
for connectivity and appropriate access devices, and
some weakly stated recipes for it like improving
connectivity between Internet backbones and using
wireless capacity for remote areas. But important
issues in this very basic Action Line like of the
respective role of public and private finance, USOs,
different regularity policies for areas with complete
market failure, public support and investments in
appropriate technology etc are altogether missing. In
this respect, it is surprising that the recognition of
the important role of public finance in reaching
infrastructure and appropriate technology to
under-served areas and people, which was a major gain in
the Prepcom 2 deliberations on financing ICTD, does not
find mention in the regional plan of a region where this
issue is most pertinent and important. The main
engagement appears to be about connectivity for business
and markets, and a pro-poor telecom policy is not
proposed at all.
Even after governments have mostly agreed in prepcom 2
of the Tunis phase that the role of direct public
interventions is crucial to reach connectivity to
underserved areas and people,
"We recognise that public finance plays a crucial role
in providing ICT access and services to rural areas and
disadvantaged populations including those in Small
Island Developing States and Landlocked Developing
Countries." (point 32 of the agreed draft of the Chapter
2 of the operational part of the Tunis Document, on
Financial Mechanisms for ICTD).
the draft RAP stays single-minded on its exclusive
reliance on private investment, with no mention of
complimenting publicly funded initiatives.
"To assist Governments in the development of policies
for ICT development and e-strategies to promote
investment in the establishment of broadband
infrastructure and the provision of e-services with
incentives for extending the reach of the network to
cover rural and remote areas. (point D 16 of Summary of
Action in the draft RAP)." (Our Comment: Civil society
feels that the term 'investments' here refers only to
private investments. Such lack of clarity and
specificity, and hedging issues, is typical of the
document.)
And the identified way to reach radio and television to
under-served areas is again through soliciting private
investments.
"To encourage policies for private sector participation
in Radio and TV broadcasting, particularly to cover
hitherto unserved areas including remote and mountainous
region and small islands". (Point 54 of Summary of
Action).
It is difficult to come across any example where private
investment spread the coverage of broadcast media to
'cover hitherto unserved areas including remote and
mountainous region and small islands'. The options of
greater public investment in these media and of
promoting community media is not considered by the draft
RAP.
The RAP does not give even a passing mention to
progressive possibilities and paradigms like VoIP and
open access telecom regulation- instead of vertically
integrated telecom structures - that are also being
advocated by many multi-lateral agencies today, and
which can greatly transform the cost effectiveness of
providing connectivity to poorer markets, as also
provide possibilities for communities - towns and groups
of villages - to own their own telecom infrastructure.
Such a local community owned telecom infrastructure
model is something which many cities in the developed
world have already adopted. The WSIS documents make many
references to the role of community based ICT
initiatives, which is an important issue completely
ignored by the draft RAP.
Access to Information and Knowledge
The draft RAP seems to equate access to information and
knowledge with access to government information alone.
Such a blinkered view of the all-important issue of
access to information and knowledge, which is the very
basis of the idea of an Information Society, is very
disturbing. The WSIS POA speaks in some detail about
various things that are needed to be done under this
Action Line. It also touches upon new content sharing
paradigms in calling for encouraging 'initiatives to
facilitate access, including free and affordable access
to open access journals and books, and open archives for
scientific information'. The Tokyo Declaration was also
much more progressive in calling for 'a vibrant public
domain'.
"Enhance the sharing and strengthening of global
knowledge for development by ensuring equitable access
to information for educational, scientific, economic,
social, political and cultural activities, leading to a
vibrant public domain of information" (Tokyo
Declaration).
However even these conceptions fall short for a clear
commitment to an 'open content paradigm' for development
and other socially useful content, that is often
produced by public funding.
The Tokyo declaration did have a separate point on
'Ensuring balance between intellectual property rights
(IPR) and public interest'.
"While intellectual property rights play a vital role in
fostering innovation in software, e-commerce and
associated trade and investment, there is a need to
promote initiatives to ensure fair balance between IPRs
and the interests of the users of information, while
also taking into consideration the global consensus
achieved on IPR issues in multilateral organizations."
"Copyright holders and distributors of content should be
cognizant of the need to ensure that content is
accessible for all, including persons with disabilities.
In this connection, access requirements should be
included in legal, regulatory and policy frameworks,
where appropriate."
The draft RAP completely avoids getting into these
territories - of IPR, public domain, and open access to
development and socially-useful content.
Capacity Building
The present document equates capacity building with
Human Resource Development, and its conception of
capacity building for Information Society at no point
goes beyond ICT for education. Issues of building
capacities of communities and of institutions, the very
basic and pressing agenda for an inclusive and
development oriented Information Society have escaped
attention entirely.
Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs
While the draft RAP does speak of guidelines for
protecting privacy, it falls quite short of a more
forthright expression in the Tokyo declaration, calling
for 'respect for the constitutional and other rights of
all persons, including freedom of expression.'
Enabling Environment
The draft RAP fails to stress the central role that
governments have to play in creating an appropriate
enabling environment for an inclusive Information
Society in the Asia Pacific, a fact recognized in the
WSIS - Geneva documents and something which is getting
even greater recognition in the emerging Tunis
documents. The role goes beyond providing a good
regulatory policy, to actual interventions that are
publicly funded. In its section on enabling environment,
the RAP does make a passing reference to non-market
enabling environment.
"To create supportive, transparent, pro-competitive and
predictable policy, legal and regulatory framework which
provides the appropriate incentives to investment and
community development in the Information Society."
However, it is not clear what exactly is meant by
'community development' here. Any positive hopes of a
community-based development approach are quickly dashed
on reading the three indicators given in the RAP for
evaluating progress on this point.
- Percentage of foreign equity allowed in ICT sector in
each country of the region;
- Investment in ICT and market capitalization;
- Value of ICT and related Hardware and Software export.
ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life
The actual uses that the ICTs are put to in order to
achieve the objectives of development is of course the
most important issue - something for which other issues
are mostly meant to build an ideal ground. So it would
have been expected that it is in this Action Line, of
actual use of ICTs in various areas, that regional and
national plans will be more expressive and detailed,
keeping in mind specific development realities of the
region. However the draft RAP in this part just makes
some perfunctory remarks on use of ICTs for public
administration, business, education, health etc but
chooses not to elaborate. These issues seem to be taken
as secondary to the infrastructure and economic issues
that dominate the action plan. A look at the indicators
of evaluation of the extent which ICTs are giving
'benefits in all aspects of life' is instructive,
"Internet activities undertaken by individuals for
dealing with government organizations/public
authorities, business/commercial transactions,
education, health care, getting agricultural
information;"
(Civil Society's comment: The way new ICTs bring
benefits to people, especially in development context,
is varied, and actual 'Internet activity undertaken by
individuals' is widely acknowledged to be mostly not a
good indicator.)
"Various activities undertaken by citizens in a
democratic process;"
(Civil Society's comment: What is to be measured is
unclear. It certainly does not look like the language of
an indicator)
"e-Commerce turn-over of the region compared to its
total trade turnover respectively for intra-region and
with the rest of the world;"
(Civil Society's comment: E-commerce is just one
e-application, and not even the main one for the
business sector yet)
"Number of persons employed and % to total population in
the IT-enabled and IT application services sector;"
"Number of persons employed and % to total population in
the ICT equipment hardware and software production."
(Civil Society's comment: The above 2 points say nothing
about whether the ICT industry is geared towards
exports, or only towards the more prosperous parts of
the national and local economy and market. It fails to
capture the impact of IT on development sectors.)
It is important to go into details while listing out the
real possibilities of applications contained in the new
ICTs for various developmental purposes like health,
education, livelihood, responsive governance etc.
Specific and detailed actions under each area, as also
appropriate indicators need to be spelt out. It is in
this Action Line that a more elaborate action plan, with
many sub- action lines, is needed to be developed by the
Regional Meet, if the purpose is really to work in the
framework laid by the WSIS DOP for a people-centered,
inclusive and development-oriented Information Society.
Also the action plan must emphasize sectoral
e-strategies along with national e-strategies. This
alone will lead to a meaningful mainstreaming of ICTs in
all developmental sectors. National e-strategies tend to
remain in the domain of the IT and telecom ministries
and exclude any real involvement of development
ministries in use of ICTs for development. Sectoral
e-strategies developed by these ministries in
consultation with the lead agency in charge of the
national e-strategy, and in cooperation with all
stakeholder in the development sector, including civil
society organizations, are the biggest imperative today
to reach the 'benefits in all aspects of life' (quoting
from the language of the Action Line) of the people who
most need such assistance.
Other Action Lines
The Regional Action Plan similarly does not do justice
to the other Action Lines
on cultural diversity and local content - (the
evaluation indicator here is the 'number of countries in
the region with websites dedicated to showcasing their
cultural development and diversity' and not the extent
of software localisation work, extent of local language
content in digital medium and on the web, the extent of
use and accessing of local content on the web etc),
on media, (the RAP speaks about role of media, but not
the new opportunities in media like blogging, citizens
media etc that are shaping up all over the world,
including in the countries of Asia Pacific) and
on international and regional cooperation (where the
document for some inexplicable reason goes back to its
preferred expression of public- private partnership'
instead of the term multi-stakeholder partnership which
is the established terminology in the WSIS process).
Specific Developmental Priorities
True to its general lack of a developmental perspective,
the Action Plan gives little serious considerations to
the special needs of the more disadvantaged groups. In
referring to women, the present document in its guiding
principles for the Action Plan goes back to
instrumentalising women in development, a tendency which
has been much contested by gender advocates, especially
since the Beijing Summit.
"..resolve to promote gender equality and empowerment of
women as effective ways to (emphasis added) combat
poverty, hunger and disease and to simulate truly
sustainable development..."
In comparison the WSIS documents as well as the Tokyo
Declaration have adopted more progressive language.
"Gender issues: Unequal power relations and other social
and cultural aspects have contributed to differential
access, participation and status for men and women in
the region. In this regard, more attention should be
given to overcoming these constraints and ensuring that
women can equally benefit from the increased use of ICTs
for empowerment and full participation in shaping
political, economic and social development." (Tokyo
Declaration)
The gender insensitivity of this document is so high
that even in areas where special needs of women clearly
require specific mention like in the section of capacity
building, there is not a single reference to issues of
gender. Such omission, especially in context of the Asia
Pacific, where women's inclusion in the emergent
Information Society is deeply challenged by
socio-cultural impediments, speak of an absence of
understanding of and commitment to a gender equal
Information Society.
In fact in the whole tabulated Action Plan the word
'gender' comes once, and there is one reference to
'women'. In the all-important part on indicators for
evaluation, these words are not found at all.
Women's empowerment is a major development issue in the
Asia Pacific and in this regard the new ICTs can play an
important role in many different ways. The challenges
and possibilities in this area require a separate action
line on Women and ICTs. It is not enough to just mention
this issue in the guidelines. Meaningful references to
other disadvantaged groups, like people with
disabilities, for whom too new ICTs holds special
promise, is as scarce in the draft RAP.
The Goals of Development
The WSIS documents have mostly referred to the need to
achieve internationally agreed development goals,
including the MDGs, but the present Draft Action Plan
has a more limiting language of calling only for
achieving MDGs. (except in the opening part where the 4
objectives of the plan are mentioned). The use of ICTs
for development cannot stay limited to the specifically
identified MDGs. The possibilities and the scope here is
much wider. In fact, as we move towards regional and
national implementation, language that stresses national
and local development needs and priorities in addition
to these internationally agreed development goals
requires to be included in the policy documents. The
WSIS documents also mention national and local
priorities at many places.
Monitoring and Evaluation
While the issues listed in the draft RAP are themselves
very inadequate, the evaluation indices have been
developed with neither any sensitivity to development
priorities nor any understanding of the specific
contexts and manner in which development activity
unfolds. While the draft RAP exhorts that
"every country at the national level may undertake
monitoring of the progress against each MDG target and
indicator by means of surveys, measurements, etc,"
it is difficult to understand why did the draft RAP
itself not adopt any such MDG or other core development
priorities based evaluation indicators. Under the
circumstances, it is facile to ask the member countries
to do it at their own level.
Implementation and follow-up of WSIS
One important substantive issue in the RAP is the manner
in which UNESCAP has taken up the role of the regional
lead organization for implementing WSIS outcomes and for
the follow up of WSIS in the region. We welcome such a
leading role in the region for UNESCAP since we are
strongly of the view that Information Society issues are
foremost social and economic issues. We are however
uncomfortable with the fact that UNESCAP takes ITU and
APT as its two natural implementing partners, exclusive
of other organizations, in most references in the draft
RAP.
In its closing section, the draft RAP mentions
categorically;
The cross-sectoral nature of the Regional Action Plan
puts the responsibility on ESCAP to lead and coordinate
the activities with active involvement of ITU and APT as
executing agencies.
These organizations - ITU and APT - have an important
role since technology is an important issue in
Information Society, but it can not become the driving
issue. The WSIS process is about a people-centered and
development-oriented Information Society and the civil
society will like to see a greater role of core
development agencies like the UNDP, and socio-cultural
agencies like the UNESCO, in the implementation and the
follow-up process.
Call to develop a new RAP through an open and inclusive
process and with due regard to development needs of the
Asia Pacific
It is also important to note that the endorsement of
roles of various organizations in the regional
implementation should take into consideration the fact
that the WSIS process has still to decide on such an
implementation and follow-up structure, and the issue
will be taken up by the prepcom 3 and finally accepted
at the summit. Under these circumstances, we once again
appeal to the governments and other stakeholders
gathered in Tehran for the 'High Level Asia-Pacific
Conference for the WSIS' to defer the adoption of a
detailed action plan for the region to till after Tunis.
They should instead use the opportunity of this
conference to develop an agreement on principles that
will guide such an action plan, and set up an open,
inclusive and transparent process, incorporating the
principle of multi-stakeholderism in its true spirit,
for developing a comprehensive action plan for building
a people-centered, inclusive and development oriented
Information Society in the Asia Pacific.
Civil Society calls for rejection of this draft Regional
Action Plan and developing a new one that takes on from
the WSIS - Geneva and Tunis - documents and builds in
the regional perspectives with due attention to the
development needs of the countries of the Asia Pacific,
instead of slipping further even on the gains made at
WSIS for the developing countries. And as mentioned
earlier the present draft RAP also completely fails the
mandate it expresses as having taken from the Tokyo
Declaration.
Civil society will like to acknowledge and commend the
inclusive and transparent process employed by UNDP-APDIP
in developing recommendations for Internet Governance.
This process has been in complete variance with the
processes employed in developing the mainstream
documents of the regional meeting. And the progressive
participatory processes employed by the APDIP also show
in the quality of the document on Internet Governance
that it has been able to put together. The new process
for developing a 'Regional Action Plan Towards
Information Society in Asia and the Pacific' should
follow the lead of APDIP's work on Internet Governance.
Izumi Aizu,
GLOCOM
Japan
Partha Pratim Sarker
Association for Progressive Communication (APC)
Bangladesh
Parminder Jeet Singh
IT for Change
India
----- Original Message -----
From: Partha <partha@bytesforall.org>
To: Anriette Esterhuysen <anriette@apc.org>
Cc: <karenb@gn.apc.org>; <wcurrie@apc.org>;
<apc.asia@lists.apc.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 2:42 AM
Subject: [Apc.asia] Tehran conference (response to draft
action plan)
>
>
> Dear All,
>
> Following document is what we plan to endorse from APC
at the Tehran
> Conference. We've some strong observations and
reservation with the text of
> the draft action plan (available at t conference
website
> at:http://www.aprcwsis05.ir/). Parminder may have sent
a draft copy at the
> WSIS plenary list to collect feedback. Therefore you
may have seen it
> earlier. Anyway, if you still have any comment please
let us know asap. CSO
> participation in this conference is very low.
Yesterday, we'd a meeting
> with Amir, Amir, Razzaqui (ICTRC) and they are not
participating. We'll sit
> down with another civil society group in Iran this
afternoon and they're
> participating. We'd like to take floor tomorrow from
civil society group
> and will make our collect views here. We also have
meetings with the high
> officials here (from UNESCAP/WSIS Secretariat) so that
our responses is
> uploaded in the official website too and later we can
engage more CSOs from
> the AP region. Best wishes,
>
> Partha
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