UN High-Level Report - Discussing Architectures for Global Digital Cooperation

The High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation was convened by the UN Secretary-General to advance proposals to strengthen cooperation in the digital space among governments, the private sector, civil society, international organizations, academia, the technical community and other relevant stakeholders. The work of the High-level Panel resulted in a report published in June 2019. The report contains three models to advance the discussion on further development of institutional structures to advance global digital cooperation within a multistakeholder framework. The first model envisions a ‘commons’ approach with coordination by UN agencies. The second model is a distributed architecture which builds on existing mechanisms. The third model enhances and extends the multistakeholder IGF.

The Robert Bosch Foundation and Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV) jointly convened a diverse group of stakeholders from Germany with expertise in tech policy, human rights and Internet Governance to discuss the three global cooperation architectures from the Digital Cooperation Report on October 23, 2019. Three members from the high level panel, Catherine Mulligan, GovTec Lab (UCL London), Nanjira Sambuli, World Wide Web Foundation and Nikolai Astrup, Minister of Digitalisation Norway, as well as Fabrizio Hochschild, UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Preparations for the Commemoration of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the United Nations also spoke at and participated in the workshop. 

Based on a discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the three models the workshop participants came up with recommendations for the further development of the governance architectures. We are documenting the main outcomes of the workshop below and hope that they can provide useful input for further discussion on how to advance digital cooperation globally. Concise descriptions of each architecture can be found in chapter 4 “Mechanisms for Global Digital Cooperation” of the report.