São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines – The Way Forward in Multistakeholder and Multilateral Digital Processes – WS 11 2025

14 May 2025 | 09:30 - 10:30 CEST | Room 8 |
Consolidated programme 2025

Session teaser

Internet governance and digital policy processes need unprecedented coordination to unlock technologies’ benefits and tackle its harms. But multistakeholder forums face huge challenges. We must improve how they build consensus and influence multilateral processes and global decisions—ensuring communities’ voices shape real, impactful solutions.

Session description

The NETmundial+10 Multistakeholder Statement from 2024 offered and called upon the worldwide community to adopt and use a set of guidelines and related process steps (“São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines” - SPMGs) in Internet governance and digital policy processes, which are distilled from existing foundational documents as well as from current good practice and experience. While no one size fits all, they shall help sub-national, national, regional, and global communities to build trust and to establish and implement multistakeholder collaboration processes and mechanisms, as well as to assess processes and mechanisms that are presented as being multistakeholder, but are so only by their name. They shall also serve as inspiration for evolving and improving multilateral processes. This session will discuss the SPMGs and their application to current and future processes.

Format

Panel discussion with invited speakers, followed by Q&A with audience.

Further reading

• NETmundial+10 Multistakeholder Statement and São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines

People

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Organising Team (Org Team) List Org Team members here as they sign up.

• Flavio Wagner (CGI.br, Brazil, and MAG/IGF)
• Ana Neves (Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation, Portugal, and MAG/IGF)
• Jorge Cancio (OFCOM, Switzerland, and MAG/IGF)

The Org Team is a group of people shaping the session. Org Teams are open and every interested individual can become a member by subscribing to the mailing list.

Key Participants

• Ana Neves (Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation, Portugal)
• Jordan Carter (AuDA, Australia)
• Jorge Cancio (OFCOM, Switzerland)
• Lise Fuhr (GEANT, Denmark)
• Valeria Betancourt (APC, Ecuador)

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Moderator

• Wolfgang Kleinwächter, Professor Emeritus, University of Aarhus

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Remote Moderator

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Reporter

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Current discussion, conference calls, schedules and minutes

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Messages

• are summarised on a slide and presented to the audience at the end of each session
• relate to the session and to European Internet governance policy
• are forward looking and propose goals and activities that can be initiated after EuroDIG (recommendations)
• are in (rough) consensus with the audience

Video record

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Transcript

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The Geneva Internet Platform will provide transcript, session report and additional details shortly after the session.

Remote moderator: Essentially, my name is Frances. I’ll be remote moderating this session. More information is available in the chat. I’ve sent the link, as you can see, online. We encourage you to raise your hand virtually if you’re joining us online. And please, if you want to write a question, just put Q in front so we can keep up with where questions are as opposed to comments. Yes, and we’ll moderate between online questions and in-person questions. And yeah, thank you all. And please, just if you’re speaking, make sure that only one person with the microphone has it on. Once you finish speaking, just turn it off so people online can understand and follow the conversation. Thank you.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Okay, thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Probably it’s a very early morning for some of our participants, and I see people are coming. And we are still waiting also for another offline speaker and another online speaker. Hopefully, we will fill the gap within the next couple of minutes because we have only 60 minutes for an issue which is really worth to discuss more in depth. So what about the Sao Paolo Multi-Stakeholder Guidelines? Let me start with a very short introduction why we have this issue, and then we will start a discussion as recommended by our moderator here. The whole issue started in the World Summit on the Information Society more than 20 years ago, not in the Tunis phase, but before the Tunis phase when we had a clash between China and the United States. The Americans argued we need private sector leadership for the Internet, and China argued private sector leadership was good for one million internet users. Soon we will have, at this time, one billion users. Now governments have to step in, and we need government leadership. So the clash was government versus private sector. And this could not be settled in Geneva in the first phase. And if you cannot settle a problem, then you create a working group and delegate all the conflicts to the working group. And this happened that Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations at this time, created a so-called Working Group on Internet Governance. And the innovation with this working group was that we need people from the private sector, from the government, but also technical experts and people from the civil society. So this was really a multi-stakeholder working group for the first time in the history of the United Nations, because normally UN working groups are intergovernmental working groups. So the discussion in the WCG about this conflict, governments versus private sector, was we do not lead us in the internet. We need collaboration, and collaboration of all sides. So the conclusion and the recommendation to the Tunis phase was the multi-stakeholder approach for the internet, not single-stakeholder leadership, but multi-stakeholder leadership. This was the conclusion, and this was adopted. But there was no clarity on which principles this multi-stakeholder approach would be based. And because of the lacking of these principles, a lot of initiatives started after the Tunis, where a number of organizations, including the Council of Europe, drafted documents with principles of internet governance. So the Council of the Ministerial Conference of the Council of Europe adopted in 2011 a declaration on principles for internet governance. The OECD drafted a document on… Principles for Internet Governance Policymaking. So we had a proposal from India, South Africa, and Brazil at this time, the so-called IPSA proposal, which proposed a new institution in the United Nations. And we had a declaration on principles from the GNI, the Global Network Initiative from APC. So there was around 10 different documents with principles for the governance of the Internet, which led to a certain confusion. And we discussed all this during the IGF in Bali, where we had the authors of the 13 different initiatives on a table. And the weakness of all these declarations was they were either regional or one-stakeholder documents. And the missing point was we need a multi-stakeholder document which is global. And this gap was closed by the NetMundial conference in 2014, where NetMundial adopted a declaration on universal principles, multi-stakeholder principles for the governance of the Internet. This is more or less the most important platform for principles, you know, about the – on which Internet governance should be based. The open point after this was the how. So we had the definition, which was adopted in Tunis. We had the principles from the NetMundial. But after NetMundial, everybody said, yeah, multi-stakeholderism is good. But you had a broad, different understanding of what is multi-stakeholderism. Everybody used it, but the understanding was rather different. And some people said it’s enough if we consult and then decide. So there was no clarity about the procedures, you know, how input from non-state actors would be. taking into account if governments negotiate on this issue. So the open question was the how, how to organize multi-stakeholder collaboration. And this was, this gap was closed by the NetMundial plus 10 just one year ago. This is the biggest achievement that we have now, not only a definition and principles, but we have also procedures how this could be organized. And this is what we want to discuss today, so that because ahead of us is the WSIS plus 20 review conference. And here we have now certain criteria where we can measure how deep the understanding of multi-stakeholder approach goes among governments which they are, when they negotiate the review of the WSIS outcome in a couple of months in New York City. So the man who was very strong behind this next to the Brazilian hosts was Jorge Cancio from the Swiss government. And that’s why, you know, I would invite Jorge to start and to speak a little bit about the, his conclusion from this very remarkable document which was adopted in Sao Paulo one year ago.

Jorge Cancio: So good morning. I hope this is working because this is a different mic than the others. So I’m just testing, but I see you, you hear me. So good morning. I’m Jorge Cancio from the Swiss government, the Federal Office of Communications. And as Wolfgang just said, I had the chance of being one of the people participating at the NetMundial plus 10 within the high level executive committee, which was tasked with organizing the the event. And just to recap, there was a consultation with the worldwide community, where the first draft of the guidelines were an input to it. And that then led to the draft that was prepared just before the NetMundial Plus10 meeting, which was published, which was subject to discussions on site in Sao Paulo. And the high level executive committee came up with a final text that was then adopted together with the other sections of the outcome document by, let’s say, rough consensus in the room in Sao Paulo. I just shared with you on the chat a link with where you can find the original English text, but also translations into the six UN official languages, as well as Portuguese, Japanese, Italian and German. And I don’t know if there’s any other translation already there. So I have like five minutes. We’ll try to respect the timing. The Sao Paulo multistakeholder guidelines are a complement to the 2014 internet governance process principles that were adopted by the original NetMundial. So I really recommend that you look into the original process principles and then you look as well at the Sao Paulo multistakeholder guidelines and the process steps. So this is complementarity. At the same time, even though we didn’t open up for discussion the 2014 principles, I think we can say that the 2024 guidelines are also an update and they show what is really important nowadays to the worldwide community, what are the burning topics, what is really of worrying or of concern to people in the multi-stakeholder community when they are talking about the multi-stakeholder approach. And in particular, the Sao Paulo multi-stakeholder guidelines focus on some of these aspects, try to give a response to them in order to render the multi-stakeholder approach not just lip service or just something that you have at a principle level, but something that really becomes truly substantive and inclusive. So that’s, I think, the main characteristic that transpires in the guidelines. And amongst other things, they talk about power asymmetries and we had long discussions whether we should explicitly mention big tech, global north, global south. In the end, we don’t have that explicitly in the text, but that was what was behind that. You have also a strong emphasis on diversity and the different needs of different parts of the community, stakeholder groups, disadvantaged parts of the community. At the same time, there’s an emphasis to create a level playing field. So in order to address those power asymmetries. and this comes with a lot of focus on capacity development, also on enabling effective participation by providing information, by providing participants with the necessary skills and resources. And there’s also a strong accent on deliberation, on really having a discussion, a deliberative approach and to accountability. So if you look at the guidelines, those are very important aspects. And I would add that also flexibility and adaptability to all the emerging, ever more quickly arising trends, technologies, developments, it’s something that the guidelines stress and also embedding rights and accountability of the different stakeholders, especially of governments, of course, and of big platforms. So if we look at WSIS plus 20, you know the process, the review process, which is going on as we speak in different fora this year, what can the Sao Paulo multi-stakeholder guidelines be useful for? I think they could inspire a much stronger process. And if the process really would follow the guidelines and the process steps of Sao Paulo, it would also render the whole exercise much more legitimate and increase the ownership by the different stakeholder groups. And if you have such a stronger process, there’s a chance to end up in December 2025, not only with a negative sum game or a zero sum game, but with a negotiation that is able to really update the WSIS framework to something that is really fit for purpose to address the challenges and the opportunities of today, incorporating, amongst other things, the updates from the Global Digital Compact that was adopted last year. We know what a weak process leads to. A weak process leads maybe to a nice paper that is adopted in New York, but by our colleagues, my colleagues at least, who are diplomats there, but which has no real backing from the community. So a weak process leads to weak results, to weak ownership. So I think that the Sao Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines could help in overcoming such a situation. And just to finalize the guidelines, I think now they are one year old. It’s a small baby. It’s starting to walk. You see there’s some work going on. There are translations that have been made on a voluntary basis. They have been referenced by different institutions, like the Government Advisory Committee in ICANN, by the ITU, by the CSTD, by UNCTAD, by the Freedom Online Coalition, and of course by many NGOs and alliances of NGOs and of the technical… community as well. So there’s something there. There’s some evolution, but there’s a lot of work to be done. They are far from being perfect. They are not one-size-fits-all processes, so they need a lot of adaptation. Just to mention an example, in Switzerland, we are looking into ways and means to use the São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines to assess how the Swiss IGF, our IGF in Switzerland, works. And we are looking into developing an illustrative guidance, and we’re thinking to prepare all of this in English as well, so that it’s replicable outside of Switzerland. And we are going to analyze the situation as it is, in light of the São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines, in order to see what are possible improvements to agenda settings, to the session formats, whether they are inclusive enough, whether we have the right feedback loops, the reporting that render the whole process truly open, diverse, and accessible. And probably we will be using also post-event survey to get the feedback from the community participating at the Swiss IGF, which normally is between 200 and 300 people. So this is what we are doing, and I hope that later on this year we will be able to report on results. Thank you so much.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thank you, Jorge. And I think the last point is of extreme importance, so that the understanding that the guidelines are not only for the global policy-making in the United Nations or elsewhere, it goes back to the ground. And I think the beauty of the IGF process is that we have the global IGF, we have the regional IGF, as here in EuroDIG, and the national IGFs. Together we form the NRI community, and the guidelines are an instrument which helps you to implement what you have preached, the multi-stakeholder approach, because, as I said in the beginning, there are not clear understandings or partly confusion about what it is. And the guidelines help you to implement what was defined 20 years ago in the Tunis agenda. And it’s in particular important for the IGF. And Lise Fuhr, who is the member of the leadership panel of the IGF, will give us a short introduction in how the leadership panel understands these guidelines from Sao Paulo. Lise, you have the floor.

Lise Fuhr: Thank you. Thank you, Wolfgang. And yes, I’m on the leadership panel together with a strong team of other internet governance advocates. And we have seen that the Sao Paulo guidelines are very important. I participated myself in Sao Paulo, drafting the guidelines. So this has a strong support from the leadership panel. I think we need to see the guidelines as a tool, as Wolfgang and also Joachim mentioned. But we also need to see that the guidelines have been formed by many years of internet governance in different organizations and different kinds of multi-stakeholder models. like we see in some of the organizations relating to ISTAR, you have ICANN, you have ISOC, ITF and the IRRs. There are many organizations around the internet ecosystem that works with principles and multi-stakeholder model, but I’m very happy with the Sao Paulo, we got a broader understanding and a broader set of guidelines that is useful for governments and organizations that are not within this group of internet governance advocates and community. And that’s one of my points, I think it’s important how we socialize the principles beyond the usual suspects, and there I think we need to be a bit more creative in our approach to spread the happy message about the guidelines and the principles. In the leadership panel we have discussed the approach on how to communicate and how to have a marketing side on the messages that we want to spread out as widely as possible, because we see the community itself knows very well what this is about. We talk to each other, we exchange, we try to align, but what about all the industries that are depending on the internet? So I’m also looking into banking industry, insurance, all of these are not present and are not discussing guidelines, and they are also important stakeholders in this whole process. So that’s one of the things we have discussed, that how can we make sure as many governments are informed and included and know about this, but how can we also make sure that the stakeholders that we’re usually not talking to also know about this and know that internet governance is important because we all use the internet and how can you participate, what is your opportunity to influence but what are also the different approaches to the discussions around the digital ecosystem we have discussed that we should not be too populistic on how to spread this but we are trying to use the different social platforms and some videos but we also know and you mentioned this yourself Wolfgang, IGF has a widespread network of organization and events happening with the regional and the national and the summer schools so there is a lot happening, you have the international IGF once a year but around the world we have a lot of participants from different parts of the world but also with different stakeholder groups participating that we can use to have a socialization of the Sao Paulo principles and I want to give you a bit of numbers and then I’ll stop and I have to leave I’m sorry at the top of the hour because I have double booked my morning but if we look at the numbers in 2006 the first IGF in Athens was 1,200 participants from 90 countries, 10 years later IGF had 2,000 on-site and 3,000 online from 123 countries But today, 20 years later, we have more than 10,000 participants from 178 countries, and you have many online too. And I think that’s a strong network we need to activate and to use, and that is part of what we want to do as leadership panelists. We have the opportunity to use this excellent network to spread messages around the guidelines. We’re working, of course, very much on the WSIS plus 20 process and trying to get input to that from all of this. So I think we are in a good place because we have seen the IGF success built on the multi-stakeholder model actually evolving and getting more and more traction all over the world. But we still need to make sure that we have many more included. And the principles and guidelines that we’re discussing today, I think, is more important than ever because we are depending much more on digital services and technologies. And we just need to make sure that these are implemented, these are used, there shouldn’t just be a piece of paper. And I see that this is happening today. What we’re discussing is exactly the principles, and this is the way also to do it. But we need to also make sure that we reach beyond the usual suspects that are very interested in Internet governance and make sure everyone understands that this is an important issue and they should engage. Thank you.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thank you, Lisa. And this is exactly the challenge, to go out of our bubble, to pull people out of their silos. and to promote the dialogue about what we are doing and how we are doing this. And I think a key element of the Sao Paulo guidelines is the section where we have defined 12 process steps. And I think what Jorge has said a little bit earlier, it’s a weak process produces weak results. So that means if you use the 12 process steps or, you know, go step by step in the process by using, as Lise has said, the guidelines as a tool, then you will have better results. So it’s an instrument which will help you to have better results. It should not be to stimulate more controversial discussion, but should help negotiators to find the right way. The process steps includes, for instance, scope the issue, identify stakeholders, engage stakeholders, share information, facilitate dialogue and all this. So we have among now three speakers who will touch a number of these various process steps so that you get more clarity about the how, how the multi-stakeholder approach can be practised in reality. And I start with Jordan, who is also online. Jordan, can you speak about some of the process steps, which are important also for the forthcoming WSIS Plus 20 Refute conference?

Jordan Carter: Yes, Wolfgang, I can and I hope that the video and the audio are working OK. Thank you for the chance to be here. We’ve only got three minutes, so I’ll be really brief, really quick. And these are not in the same order because we had a late shuffle between the speakers. But I wanted to make a few points about scoping the issue and how important that is. In the WSIS context, we know what the scope is, it’s the whole WSIS system, what will be reviewed, but often for another digital policy process, the most difficult thing for a stakeholder to do is waste time trying to understand if the thing you want to talk about with them is relevant or not. So the more clearly you specify and scope the issue, the more likely it is that you will get useful input, and the more likely it is that stakeholders you don’t already know about will come and talk to you. So it is very important to have the scope very clearly defined. The next one I’m going to talk about is number four in the list, sharing information, where the guidelines talk about clarity and transparency being important. And the point I want to reiterate here is that we had an example where the transparency around how input was going to be used was not very well done, which was the GDC negotiation last year. Seeing how the inputs that were offered were made sense of by the decision makers and how that then shaped the outputs was non-transparent. So we need to improve that. And we also need, where it’s a specialised policy area in the digital policy realm, and it’s one that might have broad public interest but low public engagement, to provide simplistic entry-level information that let people start to get to grips with the policy area. It cannot all just be expert-level content that we assume people will be able to understand. The third one I’ll briefly talk about is equitable participation. It means that people have to have access to knowledge, but it also means they have to have access to the time and to be able to vote the attention across the stakeholders who you know about and new ones who might introduce themselves to be able to engage. So that might mean that you have to do proactive outreach to make sure you have a balanced set of stakeholders engaged in the process. It might mean that that key funding needs to be provided for people, especially global south, global majority, especially people who have an interest but no economic resources to be able to finance it themselves. And given that not the entire world speaks English, it is also about translation and interpretation services to make things more accessible in a multilingual way. And the last one I’ve got on my list to briefly speak about is facilitating dialogue. I think this is the biggest challenge for processes like WSIS plus 20. There isn’t dialogue. There is, in public at least, simply an exchange of views. And even formats like roundtables are very difficult for governments to entertain. Anything that can actually move beyond the reiteration of statements that could easily be done just by writing a document and sending it in. If we really want dialogue, three-minute interventions at a microphone are not the way to do it. And if we really want dialogue, all stakeholders, including governments, need to put themselves in a position where they can have a conversation and respond to the things that are in the room. Intergovernmental processes are far away from that. We have some good case studies in the multi-stakeholder environment. Indeed, NetMundial plus 10 was a great example of it. So that facilitation is something that we all need to focus on in the various multi-stakeholder processes we do. And I’ll leave it there, Wolfgang.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Jordan, thank you very much. That was very helpful. And we go now to Anna Neves from the Portuguese government. She is also the vice chair of the UN CSDD. No longer, but she was for many years one of the most excellent vice chairs of the UN CSDD. And she can speak from a governmental perspective, because very often we have the problem that governments do not understand what multi-stakeholderism is. Ana. You have the floor.

Ana Neves: Thank you very much. Good morning. So, during this exercise of the São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines, I was there as well. But on behalf of the CSTD, I was at that time one of the vice chairs representing WEWOC, the Western Europe and other countries group. And the CSTD is the Commission for Science and Technology for Development from the United Nations. And I would like to present four of the 12 process steps, because this is about implementation. So, it’s not only to say that we have to involve more multistakeholders in the multilateral and intergovernmental processes, but it’s really on how to do it. So, the São Paulo Guidelines are very interesting because they are very pragmatic, and they, well, they just say how to do it. So, I will talk about the identification of stakeholders, how to prepare draft outcomes, factor in feedback from the wider community, and my last step will be about open decision making. So, the identification of the different stakeholders. Identifying stakeholders is not simply a BOC ticking exercise. So, it’s not only to say, so, we have here civil society tick, we have private sector tick. It’s much more than that. So, we really have, it requires a careful mapping of all relevant actors, being governments, private sector, civil society, technical or academic communities. We have to have there all the voices, but we have to ensure that diverse perspectives especially from the Global South, they are integrated from the outset. And how to do it? Well, Jordan said something interesting about that we need a dialogue, we need an exchange of views and not only statements from the other stakeholders when we have these intergovernmental exercises. So it’s the digital, but if we are talking about oceans, if we are talking about space, if we are talking about environment, of course, this concerns everybody. And of course, each stakeholder group, so for our own organization, we have to distribute and to articulate the different stakeholders in these boxes. But then, of course, there is a large diversity in each stakeholder group. Of course, governments, they are not the same, the private sector is not the same, etc, etc. So now I’m going to talk about to prepare draft outcomes. So once stakeholders are identified, the process moves to prepare the draft outcomes. This should be a collaborative effort grounded in transparency and shared responsibility. Drafting should reflect common ground while acknowledging divergences. And it must be informed by the expertise and lived realities of all the stakeholders involved. So nice words. But if we really, well, what we need, it’s really to have the right stakeholders and to have common ground and to see where we have the divergences. Because then we have to talk about the divergences. Why cannot I use human rights approach? Why cannot use now sustainability? So we have to have this dialogue and not only statements. So nobody is really listening and nobody really cares. So in doing this, we are not doing the best of our multi-stakeholder approach and on how to implement it for reality. Now, factor in feedback from the wider community. So next, it is essential to open the process to broader input. Factoring in feedback means actively reaching out beyond the immediate circle of participants. It reinforces accountability and guards against groupthink or capture by dominant voices. Feedback loops must be genuine with mechanisms in place to show how comments have influenced outcomes. When you send your comments to a process, then you are not aware if the comments were really included in the draft text. So normally you are not aware of that, so you don’t know. So you have to change that. We have to factor the feedback from the wider community. Open decision-making. Open decision-making is the cornerstone of the multi-stakeholder legitimacy. Decisions should be made through inclusive dialogue, with transparent procedures and clear documentation. This step is crucial to building trust in the process and ensuring that outcomes reflect a true multi-stakeholder consensus, not just a procedural formality. So it takes time. So all this process takes time. So I really hope that in this workshop we reach more people, more different stakeholders, to make them understand that this exists and it should be used lengthily. Thank you.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thank you, Anna. I invite now Valeria. She is also online. She was also involved from the very early days. Valeria, just recently you published a very good article together with Andrea de Esterhuizen in CircleID, which also refers to the São Paulo. I recommend everybody to read this article. Valeria, you have the floor.

Valeria Betancourt: Thank you, thank you very much. I’m very honored to be part of this conversation. Let me know if you can hear me well. Is it coming through? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, excellent, excellent. Perfect. Okay, thank you very much for the opportunity. First of all, I want to refer to a point that Jorge brought up in relation to how important ownership of the processes is, because obviously weak processes will result in lack of ownership. And I have been saying, and I refer to that in the article that you have just mentioned, that negotiation processes are always remembered not only for the outcomes, but actually they are remembered for how they were conducted, who took part. So, in other words, the processes are remembered by the dynamics of it and the overall atmosphere. So, in this case, this really influences the level of ownership of the processes as a whole by the different stakeholders. That is why these process steps are very important in order to bring into practice a multi-stakeholder approach. I will be referring to process steps 3, 10, 11 and 12 in light of some of the current most important processes that we are engaging with, such as the WSIS plus 20 review, but that also apply to other intergovernmental processes. bearing in mind that these process steps feed back into each other. So in relation to process step 3 that relates to the engagement of the stakeholders through consultations, surveys, workshops, etc. I want to say that treating non-state actor input just as an accessory, as an add-on element is not enough. Usually consultations have been happening in a way in which the non-state actors intervene for two minutes, one after each other, to make statements without governments being even in the room. And we believe that that has to change because that does not constitute dialogue. So it has to really be a conversation and a non-state actor input has to be a central part, not an add-on aspect of the consultations. Because then it will help not only to design the processes, embedding multi-stakeholder aspects into the governmental processes to improve them. Then the multi-stakeholder guidelines would also help to shape the outcomes of the processes. So that’s very important. In relation to process step 10 related to community powers and to submitting the final outcomes to the consideration of the wider community in order to ensure that there is consistency between the interest of the wider community and the outcome of specific processes, there are two key aspects that I would like to mention. The first one is The definition of the wider community is central, and we believe that each stakeholder group should have the opportunity and the prerogative to define who from their constituency are the ones whose perspectives should be considered for providing input and feedback, to make sure that the interests, particularly for the ones that have been marginalized, are considered in the outcomes and the outputs. The second element is building on the emphasis that in relation, for instance, to the WSIS, building on the emphasis that the resolution and modalities for the overall review of the WSIS plus 20 review states, which is that all relevant stakeholders should be considered in the different stages of the process. So, it refers to the preparatory process and the high-level meeting of the WSIS plus 20 review. However, the inclusion of the wider community in the review of the draft final outcomes before they are completely finalized should be integrated into the process, and this should be a practice that could be replicated in any intergovernmental process irrespective of the issue. In relation, as I said, in relation to inputs by non-state actors, there has to be transparency in how they are treated, because if inputs just go into a kind of a black box without any feedback on how the input is treated, what has been considered or not, what has been included or not, and the reasons and explanations for that, then the basis for transparency and confidence in the integrity of the process gets diluted. So, really, feedback is necessary. are necessary in how a non-stakeholder actor is treated in order to increase the legitimacy of the processes. So in other words, when it comes to what needs to be done to include stakeholders, there is a substantive commitment needed to make them very inclusive. In relation to processes steps 11 and 12, the stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities change depending on the issue being addressed, on the process. But in general, stakeholders, including governments, need to be held accountable for good inclusive processes, but also for complying with collective agreements and achieving results. And in relation to monitoring and adapting, we believe that the known paper by the Swiss government that, for instance, proposes the establishment of a strategic multi-stakeholder steering group to complement the UNGs, could be a very good way to enhance the embedding of the multi-stakeholder principle across the different steps of the processes, including the monitoring, the implementation of the processes, and adapting depending on how progress is going. Because it is only by truly including the perspectives and priorities of all stakeholders, particularly from the ones from the Global South, the underrepresented communities, that we give concrete meaning to building a digital future that is open, that is safe, that is rights-based, and that the governance of digital technologies can also make progress in terms of transparency, accountability, and democratic notions of governance. So I leave it there for now, and I’m happy to take questions if there are any.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thank you very much Valeria and we have nearly a quarter of an hour left for a discussion and for questions. So who wants to ask the first question from the floor? Because you know what we discussed more or less now in theory will become soon a very concrete practice. So we have ahead of us a number of conferences where these guidelines should be adopted in the real processes. So it starts with the ICANN meeting in Prague a couple of weeks, then we have the IGF in Oslo, we have the Business High Level Forum in Geneva and then in October we start with the Business Plus 20 process. So all these are good opportunities to check you know how the house of the Sao Paolo guidelines are implemented in practice. So any comments or questions from your side are welcome. So please introduce yourself and then ask your question Marilia and then you.

Marília Maciel: So it works, yeah. Thank you, my name is Marília Maciel, I am Director for Digital Trade and Economic Security at Diplo, but I would like to speak on my personal capacity and as someone that was very heavily involved in the organization of the first NetMundial conference in Brazil in the drafting of the outcome document. I did not participate in Sao Paolo so I look from the perspective of an outsider this time. But my first reaction first of all is on practical terms. When we look at the document it’s a very good document but also a very long document. And we had this experience when we were working in the Commission on Global Cyber Stability. We produced a final report which was also very long and that gave whoever was interested the rationale of what we were trying to do and I think the Sao Paolo document does exactly that. But it also means a follow-up document. which is very concise and easy to read. What we did in the commission was to produce a one-pager in which we would explain in one paragraph each of the cyber norms that the commission approved together with a drawing, so it was even visually compelling. And I’m saying this because I think that some governments, they are making a good effort in trying to make sure that this document, these guidelines, they are introduced in UN processes, for example. Two weeks ago in the CSCD meeting on data governance, Switzerland, Canada, they were mentioning that we should have a reference to the Sao Paulo principles in our TOR. But then other governments were saying, but we don’t know what the content of these guidelines is. It’s not a UN approved document, so we just don’t want to insert that. So if we can communicate more easily, I think that will be something relevant. Second of all, what is our target here? Because one thing is to improve processes which are within the internet governance realm. And my question to Jorge would be, can we have this toolkit implementation of the principles even before the IGF, so we can start raising awareness? Because if this agenda of meetings is going to take place, it’s important that we know how to implement and we start to push for the organizers to implement these principles when they are in the phase of preparing all these meetings that are going to take place. This is very important, but my point is that this is not all, because digital policy in recent years has become an instrument of economic statecraft. And this means that because of our interdependent digital economy, our governments are using digital policy to achieve their geopolitical foreign policy goals. And these policies are being crafted by public servants who are well intended, but have no idea about what internet governance is, much less about a multi-stakeholder participation. So my question is, how do we take this to spaces where these policies are being crafted? And especially… to discuss digital trade today. I go to despair when I go to WTO and I speak to colleagues there and they have no idea about what we’re discussing here, but the WTO is negotiating privacy, cybersecurity, data flows, access to the source code, and the list goes on and on. So how do we communicate with them? There have been efforts again by some governments, Canada, New Zealand, Ukraine, to try to make WTO conversations at least transparent, because they are not open to observers and all the documents that are presented for negotiations, they are not public, not even online. So we cannot contribute, we cannot know what is being negotiated, but the same governments that participate in the IGF and advocate for the multi-stakeholder principle, they did not support this proposal for making WTO documents accessible, presented by Canada and so on. So we have a disconnect even inside governments, and perhaps Ana and Jorge can comment on that, between parts of the government doing trade policy, digital trade and economic security, DG Connect, and inside our own governments that do not talk to each other. So how do we reach these people and make sure that they open the process of decision-making to other stakeholders? Otherwise, I’m afraid that what we are discussing here, in terms of the geopolitical considerations, will be less and less relevant, and we are going to influence less and less the destiny of digital policy in the world.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Very good point, and that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, I think it’s not new, but it’s a challenge and it gets more complex looking into the future. We collect now some statements, and then we will have a final round. We have also online comments. Please take the floor.

Jacques Beglinger: My name is Jacques Begelinger. I was former secretary of the Swiss IGF, and I’m now with the board of EURDIG. Actually, my intervention was just the same as was just before, but just with a nuance. On the one side, it might be beneficial to have Sao Paulo methodology extended to any other area of the world. international discussions. So in, for example, when I think of discussions on environmental issues and sustainability, but at the same time, I’m wondering whether, since it seems to work to a certain extent in the digital environment, whether it would, in a way, a threat if we expand the methodology too far, that it might then become just a bone of contention all over any multilateral, multi-stakeholder discussion in any field and just somehow be devoured by the normal, very difficult discussions amongst the usual blocks in any international discussion.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thank you. We take now the online question. And then Sebastian.

Nnenna Nwakanma: Go ahead, Nnena. Right. Can anyone hear me or see me? Okay, I see myself on the screen. So yeah. Hello, everyone. And I’m really grateful to those of us who woke up early. So I want to say a few things. Thanks for convening this. I actually had to reach out to Javier to tell him that I’m interested in this session. I’m thankful to all of the previous speakers, Jorge and all of you. I think we need to raise more awareness on the principles so that more people can, more processes do not see the light of the day in implementation is because the process in itself was faulty. And that is why I would like to say the NetMundial plus 10 principles, the Sao Paulo principles are for me one of the most important things that we have achieved as a community in digital governance. And I do believe that we should extend it beyond in the internet governance arena. Yes, it is a product of the internet governance community, but the same way that the internet is no longer stuff within scientists and academics, but a global common good. I think that the Sao Paulo principles should also be extended to be something that would be of benefit to the larger governance community. So I came, I don’t, yesterday I was with Yanis Kaklinks, for those who remember Ambassador Yanis Kaklinks, who was vice president of the World Summit on Information Society preparatory process that led to the summit itself. And it was good to touch base with him. And I want to come back to this because I was at, I was there in 2014. I participated in 2024 and I’m here and actually got an invite to Brazil for CGI’s 30th birthday. I don’t know if I’ll get a visa to go, but I’m still planning. Here is what I want to say, because I see Adam Aret has been mentioned. A lot of you in this room, Wolfgang, including yourself, we’ve had 25 years of collaboration at the minimum, and I’d want to talk about mentoring and racist guidance, being racist people, being mentors, and that is why I’m in Latvia. Because there is a generation of governance and decision makers that believe that the fastest you have a result, the better you are. And it is our duty as seniors, as mentors, as racist people, to bring these people back. The process is key because of the things I mentioned earlier on, and this is where I want to end. Whether it is in the internet governance itself, most of us should be retiring. We should be doing internet governance schools, training more people, having the younger generation take over from us. But I think that our role as mentors and as racist people should continue beyond the internet governance community into other governance communities. I have started disseminating, democratizing this principle, speaking to other spaces where I’m either an advisor or a technical assistant, and I’ll be happy to collaborate with any of you. You know me already. My name is Nnenna. I come from the internet. Thank you very much.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thank you, Nnenna. Thank you very, very much, and I fully agree that we have to deal now with the grandchildren of the internet, not the children of the internet. And this is a new generation, and we had here a very good Youth Participation Special Youth Caucus, which worked on a very good document, so I encourage you to go to the session and to read the outcome. So, we are, like always, under pressure of time. Sebastian, if you could make it very brief, and Wout also. And Juan, these are the three final interventions. I think if we go into the coffee break, we have 25 more minutes. Would you agree? So, then we have four interventions. So, Sebastian, Wout, Fernando, and you. And then we have the final one.

Audience: Thank you very much, Wolfgang, Sebastian Bachelet, AISOC France, and Chair Viorallo. And I am very honoured to talk after Nenna. I agree with you, Nenna. I just wanted to raise one issue and to take into account what the previous speakers have said. First, the fact that how we can use the declaration of Sao Paolo and NetMundial, NetMundial and NetMundial plus 10. If we don’t show the way within the internet governance, we will not be able to bring that outside in the other field of humankind. And I think what Gorg is saying about using it for the Swiss IGF, maybe something to be spread around the national IGF. Yeah, you can laugh, but I think it’s important. And taking into account what Wolfgang said about the next meeting, I hope that we will be able to bring that to ICANN to see how ICANN fit. with those principles. Because if we don’t do that, we have a tool, but we don’t care for ourselves. And that’s an important point. If we want to bring that to others, let’s use it for us first. Thank you very much.

Valeria Betancourt: Thank you, Sebastian.

Ana Neves: Yes, sorry. It’s only to say to Sebastian that we were laughing, because when you mentioned Swiss IGF, it appears Swiss side IGF. So that’s why.

Wout de Natris: Yes, thank you, Wolfgang. My name is Wout de Natris. I’m the coordinator of the Dynamic Coalition at the IGF on Internet Standards, Security and Safety. And we also, Dynamic Coalition, want to say something very short, is that we are having a discussion among ourselves how to implement the São Paulo principles into our own work, to be more transparent. The second is on the black box of New York. I presented that twice in the famous two minutes and managed to use them exactly to two minutes. But that was a black box, and I had no idea what was going to come out of it. And to my surprise, Dynamic Coalitions are now mentioned everywhere in documents of the IGF, of ODET, etc. And it worked, but don’t ask me how. But in the end, you had influence by having those two minutes. And so that was a positive experience. Then my question is that we have a lot of outcomes out of EURIDIC, national IGFs and at the IGF, but we’re very bad at celebrating our successes and our outcomes. So how should we be organizing ourselves if we get the extension to make sure that these messages are proliferated in a much broader way, in a way that we know where, at what desk, at what time these messages have to land, so that the right people get the message at the right time. And that is something that we don’t do. because we usually stick it on the digital website and then good luck with it. So how do we organize ourselves better in communication and proliferation? So thanks.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thanks, Fernando, and good to have another speaker from Brazil.

Luis Fernando Castro: Hi, good morning. I’m Luis Fernando Castro, I’m a lawyer in Sao Paulo, and I am a former board member of the CGI, that is the Brazilian Student Committee. In a certain measure, I would like to mention that I believe that the guidelines were approved for multi-stakeholder model approval, was adopted or approved either in the first and second net mundial because we were in Brazil. In Brazil, I feel, I believe that the global south feel more comfortable to make their statements and bring their contribution more than when we are in a formal place in Europe. But most of this, I should say that CGI is, as Nina told, we are now completing 30 years of existence with a wonderful and very, very successful work. And as Wolfgang mentioned, but I must bring for you a bad news or our worries because we are now facing a major threat from the Brazilian parliament that there is a bill of law proposing that CGI, that is an independent organization, multi-stakeholder that joins academia, government, private sector and civil society. There is a proposal to bring CGI structure to put it under the National Telecommunication Agency that would represent a major rupture in our stakeholder, multi-stakeholder model. And for this proposal. For this reason, we need a big support from this community. And I know that Wolfgang is helping us a lot. But everyone who can express the support to the Brazilian model that is well recognized as a successful model of multi-stakeholderism is well received. Thank you.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: This will remain an uphill battle and for a long time, for the next five, ten years. So the final speaker and then we move to the very final round. We have also to present some messages.

Lea Kaspar: Thank you, my name is Lea Kaspar, I run Global Partners Digital. I was there for the original and at Mundial as well as in the plus 10. And we recently worked with a number of you in this room to develop a five point plan to inform the WSIS plus 20 negotiations. And to an extent, I was inspired by the by this document. So it’s great to have this conversation here. My intervention here, I’m going to. I want to be very technical about this, and my favorite part of the document are the process steps, I’m very happy to have heard a lot of the speakers talk about them very specifically. But in an effort to it’s not a but, but let me put it this way. A lot of the a couple of years ago, we worked on trying to operationalize multistakeholder approach in national cybersecurity strategy development. And I’ve noticed something in this document that I think we could we could have a look at again in thinking about how we operationalize this further. And that is the relationship between some of these process steps with each other. And I’ll be very, very concrete. The first two steps that are mentioned, and these are the steps about scoping out the issues and identifying relevant stakeholders. Now, I think that this is excellent to have in there. I think that is so critical. But to an extent, the results of those processes, right, scoping out the issue. and many others. So, I think that this is a very important issue and identifying the stakeholders, the results of those mappings will affect the way that we implement the rest of the principle, sorry, not the rest of the process steps. And why I’m saying that is we often use this general language about all stakeholders need to be there and, but it really does depend on what issue we’re dealing with, where in the process cycle we are, whether we’re dealing with a national level process or a global and like if you take, or if it’s a technical issue or non-technical issue, and it will be very different if we’re developing the global digital compact compared to dealing with a cyber attack at the national level. How many rounds of feedback we can receive from the community is not going to be the same. Not everyone has to be in that room when we’re dealing with a cyber vulnerability. At the moment, when you read the process steps, it doesn’t account for that. And the results of those first two steps informing how we then adjust the benchmarks for the other process steps is something that I think we need to work on as a next step in further operationalizing this. There’s ways of doing that, toolboxes and frameworks that we can develop that are practical, that when someone wants to then put this to the test, can actually go beyond kind of the generalities and actually then adapt it based on the results of those first two steps being implemented. So it’s not a question or a suggestion as we think through what happens next, but also interested in like how we resolve this tension if any of the speakers have views on that. Thank you.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thank you, Lea. And I’m very happy that you mentioned the five-point plan for the WSIS negotiation, because what I see as a result from the resolution which was adopted by the General Assembly on the modalities for the WSIS process, that we end up with a parallel process. We have the intergovernmental process, which is chaired by the two co-facilitators. And then we have the multi-stakeholder consultation process, which is convened by the President of the General Assembly. And there is no procedure in place how these two processes interact. So that means it will depend from the President of the General Assembly, you know, how to bring, so his task is to collect input. But what the President will do with the collected input, so and how open are the intergovernmental negotiations, these are open questions. And insofar, your five-point plan is very relevant and important. And it should be used like the multi-stakeholder guidelines. So unfortunately, time is running out. So we are obliged to summarize our debate in form of some messages. And Bruna, who was involved in all this, has prepared already something. And Bruna, are you online?

Bruna Santos: Yes, I am. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Wolfgang. Can you guys hear me well? Not sure if I can be heard. If you guys can flag it to me, then I can move on with reading the messages.

Ana Neves: Yes, we can hear you.

Bruna Santos: Thanks so much, Ana. If you can open my camera, that would be nice as well. But I’m starting with the messages. First of all, thanks, everyone, for the great input. It really brought me back to Sao Paulo last year. That was a huge pleasure to have shared the HLAC, the High-Level Executive Committee for the NetMundial with all of you. So the first message I’ve captured from this panel was that we need more comprehensive processes, steps like identifying stakeholders, preparing draft outcomes in a transparent way, factoring feedback from the wider community, and open decision-making are some of the things we can do that are easily extracted from the Sao Paulo model. multistakeholder guidelines in order to foster more trust in the various processes and ensuring that outcomes reflect a true multistakeholder consensus and not just a procedural formality. Secondly, the multistakeholder approach needs to be applied in a way that it’s meaningful and relevant to the specific context and issue under discussion. And in this context, we need less limitations to the conversation and foster more participation. We need a dialogue and improved exchange of views between all stakeholders. And this is more needed than ever. The São Paulo multistakeholder guidelines are, again, a good path for more inclusion and reaching beyond the usual suspects interested in internet governance. And the last message would be a critical approach to consensus is needed in a context where power is an equal. Consensus building could lead to minority voices being either silence or a source of disruption. And it is crucial for truly multistakeholder inclusive approaches to digital related issues and processes to identify, acknowledge and document the differences. That will be it. And back to you, Wolfgang. Thanks a lot.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter: Thank you, Bruna. And unfortunately, we are already 15 minutes, 18 minutes over time. So there is no chance to continue with the discussion and to react to the various questions. But we have a coffee break and we can continue on a bilateral basis. And as I said, this will remain an uphill battle for the next 5, 10, 15 years for WSIS plus 30 in the year 2035. So we have a lot of things to do in the years to come. And I thank you for your participation and for your patience to stay in the room even 15 minutes longer than expected. So see you and have a safe travel home.