Abstract:
New modes of governance increasingly go beyond the traditional intergovernmental approach to include business actors and sections of civil society. Multi-stakeholder processes claim to involve all relevant parties in decisionmaking. However, a closer look reveals that opportunities of participation are often limited to large professionalised NGOs, while grassroots movements are missing. This paper seeks to identify the challenges and obstacles for these actors to get further involved, but also the opportunities that have emerged in recent policy processes. It will suggest changes in governance systems to open up for wider participation. The paper looks at two multistakeholder processes: the UN World Summit on the Information Society (Wsis) and the Council of Europe 7th Ministerial Conference on Mass Media Policy. Both processes provide interesting case studies as they attracted a diversity of civil society actors, leading to different layers of intervention. We look specifically at activist media projects and community radio stations that usually do not focus on policy, do not have the financial and structural background of a larger organisation, and that chose to intervene in those processes outside the remit of larger advocacy organisations and coalitions. Drawing from the two cases, we identify internal challenges (which aspects of activist networks hinder their influence and how can these be tackled?), relations with other civil society actors (how can different tactics and strategies complement each other?) and structural changes in governance systems, in order to enable activist and grassroots networks to participate. Keywords: global governance; media policies; civil society; activists networks; participation.