Modes of Governance in Digitally Networked Environments: Perspectives from an Interdisciplinary Workshop

Abstract

Together with Christian Pentzold from the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany, I am currently in the process of establishing an international and interdisciplinary research initiative focusing on Modes of Governance in Digitally Networked Environments. As a first step, we organized an EPSRC-funded workshop on the same topic to be held at Oxford University on March 26. The aim is to explore a new perspective on the theoretical and practical issue of Internet governance. Starting point is the observation that existing approaches to Internet governance can be broadly grouped into two traditions. The first tradition analyzes Internet governance from the perspective of more or less institutionalized stakeholders and policy processes on a national and transnational level. The focus here is commonly on the management and design of large-scale technical infrastructures and associated problems, such as domain names, intellectual property, security, or social inequality. The second tradition developed partly out of a critique of the first one and does not so much focus on high-level institutional actors, but rather individual users and nonusers and their everyday experience of governance on the Internet. Studies in this area concerned a number of different governance regimes, such as open source communities, virtual worlds, or the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The Oxford workshop seeks to introduce a research program on Internet governance that aims to complement and balance the two traditions. It does so by identifying modes of governance, i.e. patterns of interaction among individual as well as institutional actors, and analyzing the role of Internet technologies in enabling these. Such an approach promises to (a) foster the development of empirically grounded theories of Internet governance at the level of large-, medium-, and small-scale interactions while (b) avoiding rather vague characterizations like self-regulation, decentralization, or peer production. A couple of interesting themes have already emerged from the more than two dozens of submissions we received. First, workshop contributions come from a variety of disciplines, ranging from political science, law, sociology, and economics to anthropology, communication studies, computer science, and science & technology studies. It seems that a focus on modes of governance is especially suited to facilitate dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. Second, virtually all contributions develop their findings from some form of empirical analysis of Internet governance in action. Third, although the idea for the workshop was theoretically motivated, the findings seem equally relevant and useful for policy-makers and designers in business, government, and civil society. In Brussels, we would therefore like to present the outcomes, findings, and emerging themes from the Oxford workshop and give an outlook on the potential and challenges of the research initiative as part of the interdisciplinary field of "Global Internet Governance.