From Conversation to Coordination: Reinventing the IGF for an Inclusive Digital Future

​In an era when the Internet underpins nearly every aspect of human progress, the mechanisms that govern it must reflect the openness, inclusivity, and collaboration that define the digital space itself. The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), established by the United Nations as part of the World Summit in the Information Society process (WSIS), was conceived as a neutral, multistakeholder platform where governments, civil society, the private sector, and the technical community could discuss the public policy issues shaping the Internet. Over nearly two decades, the IGF and its network of national and regional initiatives (NRIs) have become indispensable laboratories for inclusive, evidence-based policy dialogue.

The Internet has become the nervous system of modern civilization — connecting people, powering economies, and enabling innovation across borders. Yet the governance of this shared resource remains one of the most complex policy challenges of our time. The IGF stands as one of the few truly global mechanisms where all voices can participate on equal footing. Its success lies not in enforcing rules, but in enabling knowledge exchange.

The IGF, along with its regional and national initiatives, has shown what inclusive, evidence-based policy dialogue looks like. Rather than inventing new processes, the global community should invest in the ones that already work. The challenge ahead is to give the IGF the tools to go beyond discussion — to become a true implementation and coordination hub for digital cooperation.

That means:

• Ensuring sustainable funding for the IGF and its regional networks;
• Tasking each Member State to support an active national IGF by 2026, with meaningful participation from youth, civil society, and technical experts; and
• Mandating that outputs from these IGFs directly inform UN digital policy processes, closing the loop between dialogue and decision.

Because strengthening the IGF system is how we make multistakeholder governance real — not just a word in communiqués.

1. Evolving the IGF into a Coordination and Implementation Hub

The IGF’s greatest strength — its open, non-binding nature — is also its limitation. While it excels at dialogue, its outputs too often remain disconnected from decision-making. The next step in its evolution should not be about creating new bureaucracies, but about building structured pathways that connect the IGF’s insights with the formal policy machinery of the United Nations.

A practical approach is to anchor the IGF’s coordination role through a formal interface with UNGIS — the United Nations Group on the Information Society. As the UN’s internal coordination mechanism for digital and ICT policy, UNGIS brings together agencies such as ITU, UNESCO, UNDP, UNCTAD, and others. By linking with UNGIS, the IGF could channel its multistakeholder recommendations directly into inter-agency planning and program design.

Each year, the IGF Secretariat, supported by the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), could compile a Digital Cooperation Compendium summarising key recommendations, case studies, and good practices from global, regional, and national IGFs. UNGIS could then review and integrate these findings into its collective work, ensuring that issues debated in multistakeholder settings inform the operational priorities of the UN system.

UNGIS, in turn, could report back to the IGF community on how these inputs have influenced inter-agency coordination — thus creating a genuine feedback loop between open dialogue and institutional action. In this way, the IGF becomes not a decision-maker but a knowledge and coordination hub — ensuring that evidence-based, inclusive dialogue is embedded across the UN’s digital policy ecosystem.

2. Leveraging National and Regional IGFs: Building Upward from the Local

The distributed architecture of the IGF ecosystem — with more than 150 national and regional initiatives — represents one of the UN system’s most successful experiments in bottom-up governance. These initiatives embody the principle that digital policy must be local to be legitimate. But their potential remains underutilised.

a. Making National IGFs Engines of Capacity and Cooperation

By 2027, each Member State should be encouraged to establish and sustain an active, inclusive national IGF. Yet this goal must go beyond symbolism. National IGFs should serve as. engines of digital capacity-building — convening public-private partnerships, incubating youth-led innovation challenges, and conducting open consultations on national digital strategies.

However, some governments remain hesitant to invest in such mechanisms. To route around this reluctance, national IGFs can be supported through multi-source partnerships where local universities host IGF secretariats; development agencies provide grants through their digital inclusion programmes; and technology companies contribute in-kind support, such as data-sharing, mentorship, and technical resources.

Philanthropic foundations and regional development banks could establish small grant schemes for national IGFs that demonstrate tangible impact — for example, advancing digital literacy, inclusion of marginalized communities, or responsible AI governance. In this way, the IGF ecosystem’s financial resilience would come from distributed ownership, not dependency.

b. Regional IGFs as Policy Conduits and Knowledge Hubs

Regional IGFs can serve as coordination bridges between national and global levels, articulating shared regional priorities and fostering policy coherence. To deepen this function, regional IGFs could develop policy observatories on cross-border issues such as cybersecurity, cross-jurisdictional data flows, and digital trade. These observatories would collect comparative evidence, map regional best practices, and feed structured policy analyses into the global IGF process.

A Network of NRI Coordinators could also be institutionalised under the global IGF Secretariat, facilitating peer learning, mentoring, and the sharing of logistical and financial resources among NRIs. This would make the IGF ecosystem a living web of collaboration — dynamic, adaptive, and mutually reinforcing — rather than a linear hierarchy.

c. Ensuring Global South Participation

For the IGF to be truly global, participation from the Global South must not be aspirational but guaranteed. The barriers are well known — limited funding for travel, weaker digital infrastructure, and fewer institutional linkages with global policy circles. Addressing these requires both resources and imagination.

The IGF Trust Fund could allocate a dedicated Global South Participation Facility to finance attendance, regional hubs, translation, and hybrid engagement platforms. Regional IGFs in Africa, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific should also receive targeted support to conduct capacity-building fellowships that train local stakeholders in Internet governance processes.

Global institutions and donors must view Global South participation not as charity but as strategic necessity. Global digital policy cannot succeed if it excludes the regions where most of the next billion Internet users will come from. Mechanisms that amplify these voices — both financially and institutionally — are essential to the IGF’s legitimacy and future.

3. Mobilising the Internet Community: Co-Ownership of Digital Governance

The IGF’s strength lies in its people. By now it is established that no single actor alone can govern the Internet; each stakeholder brings indispensable perspectives. The IGF embodies this ethos of shared responsibility — but the community must now take on a co-ownership role in sustaining it.

The private sector can contribute not just financially but substantively — by sharing research, data, and technical expertise to inform policy debates. Civil society and academic networks can anchor the IGF’s evidence base, ensuring that policymaking remains rights-based and empirically grounded.

Most importantly, youth inclusion must be institutionalised. Youth-led IGFs, supported through mentorship and microgrants, can become incubators for new ideas and leadership. The next generation of Internet stewards is already here; the IGF should give them the platforms and resources to shape digital futures, not just inherit them.

Collaboration must be our engine — and the Internet community, in all its diversity, must be the fuel that keeps that engine running.

4. Creating a Government Cooperation Track within the IGF

As global digital challenges increasingly require coordinated public policy responses, governments need a structured venue to deepen their dialogue within the IGF system — one that strengthens cooperation while remaining anchored in multistakeholder principles. To this end, the IGF could establish a Government Cooperation Track: a standing space within the annual IGF and its intersessional activities dedicated to intergovernmental dialogue on digital policy.

This track would serve as a forum for enhanced cooperation — allowing governments to exchange policy experiences, identify convergence points, and discuss priorities for coordination on issues such as cross-border data governance, cybersecurity norms, and digital trade. Crucially, this process should not be isolated or closed. It must remain transparent and observable to the broader IGF community, preserving the Forum’s culture of openness.

Multistakeholder observers — including civil society, technical experts, and the private sector — would have the opportunity to follow discussions and contribute written feedback. To ensure coherence, the outcomes of this track should feed back into the IGF plenary, informing wider multistakeholder debates and generating practical follow-up recommendations.

This two-way feedback loop between governmental cooperation and the broader IGF community would transform the IGF into a truly integrated ecosystem — where dialogue, coordination, and inclusivity reinforce each other rather than compete. It would also address long-standing calls to operationalise enhanced cooperation within an existing, trusted UN framework — without creating parallel or duplicative structures.

5. Financing the IGF: Innovation and Shared Responsibility

No forum can function effectively without predictable resources. The IGF’s reliance on voluntary contributions to the UN Trust Fund has proven insufficient. Yet even as some Member States hesitate to commit financially, there are creative ways to secure sustainable support.

a. Diversifying Funding Streams

The IGF can broaden its base of support by combining public, private, and philanthropic contributions. Transparent, multi-stakeholder funding windows could be established for specific themes — such as inclusion, cybersecurity, or youth engagement — allowing contributors to align with causes without influencing the Forum’s agenda.

Regional IGFs could manage their own sub-funds, drawing on regional organisations, associations, and cross-border digital initiatives. This distributed financial model would mirror the Internet’s decentralized structure: resilient, diverse, and self-sustaining.

b. Recognising Non-Financial Contributions

Not all support must be monetary. Governments and organizations that cannot provide direct funding could contribute in-kind — hosting meetings, seconding experts, or providing technical infrastructure. Some of this is already happing, albeit not as structured. A cooperative contribution index could recognise all forms of support, ensuring transparency and rewarding engagement across all sectors.

c. Exploring Innovative Mechanisms

Financing the IGF’s long-term sustainability should align with global development priorities  by mobilising existing mechanisms that already support digital transformation, capacity-building, and governance.

International and regional development banks — such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Inter-American and Asian Development Banks — could integrate IGF participation and capacity-building into their digital economy programs. These banks already fund infrastructure and policy reforms for digital inclusion; extending this to support the IGF ecosystem would ensure that governance keeps pace with growth.

Blended finance instruments could also be explored, linking public and private investment. Development finance institutions could create Digital Governance Catalytic Funds, co-financed by governments, philanthropic foundations, and responsible technology firms. These would support projects emerging from IGF processes — regional literacy campaigns, open data initiatives, or research on digital rights — turning IGF dialogue into cooperative implementation.

The IGF could also form strategic partnerships with global initiatives such as UNDP’s Digital Strategy, the WEF’s EDISON Alliance, or OECD digital economy programs, channelling technical assistance and funding into national and regional IGFs. Similarly, public-philanthropic partnerships could underwrite youth fellowships, inclusion programmes, and research grants under the IGF umbrella, with full transparency through the IGF Trust Fund.

In essence, innovative financing for the IGF is about new alliances. By aligning with the mandates of development banks, the private sector, and philanthropic actors, the IGF can secure diversified, predictable resources that reinforce its mission as a global public good.

6. Closing the Loop: From Dialogue to Decision

For the IGF’s deliberations to shape real-world outcomes, they must feed systematically into the policy-making architecture of the United Nations. Through its formal relationship with
UNGIS, the IGF can ensure that its outputs inform the digital strategies of UN agencies and intergovernmental bodies.

Insights from IGF discussions on data governance could influence UNCTAD’s work on digital trade or the CSTD’s data governance deliberations; recommendations on digital literacy could inform UNESCO’s education initiatives; and deliberations on connectivity could complement ITU’s infrastructure programmes. Such alignment would create coherence across the UN system while preserving the IGF’s independence.

A periodic UNGIS–IGF Dialogue Session, held alongside the global IGF, could review how the Forum’s multistakeholder insights have been reflected in UN action. This mechanism would institutionalise accountability and ensure a continuous feedback loop between dialogue, implementation, and evaluation.

7. Investing in What Works

The Internet Governance Forum has proven that dialogue can be democratic, informed, and inclusive. It is the living embodiment of multistakeholder governance — but to remain relevant, it must now evolve into a coordination hub that connects conversation to cooperation, and participation to policy.

Strengthening the IGF means reinforcing what the world already has: a proven mechanism that brings everyone to the table. By deepening its links with UNGIS, empowering its national and regional networks, ensuring participation from the Global South, diversifying its financing, and engaging the entire Internet community, we can ensure that the IGF remains the beating heart of global digital cooperation.

Collaboration must be our goal — and the Internet Governance Forum is where that collaboration lives. By investing in it, we invest in a digital future that is open, secure, and governed by all.