Civil Society within ICT Partnerships:

Abstract: In this short treatise, I discuss the challenge of building confidence among potential civil society actors in multi-stakeholder partnerships. The United Nations and other policy governance bodies have slowly been shifting from a state-centric approach toward more multi-stakeholder partnership-type formats. However civil society organizations have not completely accepted these MSPs as their preferred mode of operations within these policy processes. In the first section of this discussion I describe trust as a non-trivial factor in entry and commitment to multi-sector partnership-type policy arrangements. I present a simple typology of the various relationships that civil society actors have had to public policy fora, from “watchdog ” to “implementer ” roles. Then I enumerate some unique characteristics of civil society that make them particularly sensitive to entering into these kinds of processes. Finally I make eight recommendations for the design and implementation of partnership-type processes to increase trust and buy-in by civil society actors