The Cooperation We Already Built: Rediscovering the Power of WSIS

In the crowded world of digital cooperation, new initiatives seem to appear every year — new panels, dialogues, frameworks, and compacts, each promising to bring order to the fast-changing digital landscape. Yet in the midst of this proliferation, we risk overlooking something remarkable: the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) already gave us a working architecture for inclusive, legitimate, and sustained global collaboration on digital issues.

Long before “digital cooperation” became a buzzword, WSIS established a framework that remains one of the UN system’s most trusted and durable. It connects policy analysis, multistakeholder dialogue, implementation, and coordination through four complementary mechanisms:

• The Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) — the intergovernmental body reviewing WSIS follow-up and providing evidence-based policy guidance.
• The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) — the open multistakeholder space where global digital dialogue thrives.
• The WSIS Forum — the annual platform for sharing implementation experiences, partnerships, and innovation.
• The United Nations Group on the Information Society (UNGIS) — the system-wide coordination mechanism ensuring coherence across UN entities.

Together, these mechanisms form a unique ecosystem of trust and cooperation — one that most new processes would envy. It is inclusive, participatory, and proven. It brings governments, civil society, the technical community and the private sector together under a shared, long-standing framework. And crucially, it has endured for two decades, building institutional memory, legitimacy, and a rhythm of engagement that few other processes in the digital sphere can match.

But the WSIS ecosystem also extends far beyond these formal structures. Across the world, conversations inspired by WSIS values and themes continue to unfold — in national and regional IGFs, ICANN meetings, technical community gatherings, and countless development and policy dialogues. These spaces reflect the same spirit of openness and cooperation that WSIS seeded twenty years ago. They demonstrate that WSIS is not confined to Geneva or New York — it is a living, distributed network of dialogue and trust that spans continents and communities.

Now, as the WSIS+20 Review approaches, the global community faces a pivotal opportunity: not merely to commemorate the Summit’s twentieth anniversary, but to rediscover and reinvigorate the power of WSIS itself. This review should not be a technical exercise in reporting progress — it should be a moment of renewal, a chance to reaffirm the WSIS architecture as the foundation for coherent, inclusive digital cooperation at a time when global trust is in short supply.

Rather than searching for new frameworks or creating parallel structures, the WSIS+20 process can re-energize coordination across the existing WSIS pillars — aligning them around shared priorities, ensuring their outputs inform each other, and demonstrating how a twenty-year-old framework can still guide the world through the next generation of digital transformation.

The call, then, is not to reinvent — but to reconnect.
 
The Temptation to Reinvent the Wheel

The current Global Digital Compact (GDC) process has generated new initiatives — notably the AI Scientific Panel,and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. These are important efforts towards global coordination but they remain narrow in scope, limited to a single technology domain, and still in early stages of building the kind of multistakeholder legitimacy that WSIS mechanisms have cultivated over nearly two decades.

Rather than creating parallel or duplicative platforms, the smarter path is to connect and amplify what already exists. The WSIS ecosystem, if better aligned internally, can provide precisely the kind of coherence and legitimacy the global community is seeking through the GDC.

Connecting the Dots Within the WSIS Ecosystem

Each WSIS mechanism operates effectively within its mandate — but the threads between them could be stronger. Better coordination does not require new institutions, resolutions, or reforms. It requires only that we make the existing architecture work as one coherent whole.

Here are practical ways to do that — fully within existing mandates:

1. A Common Calendar and Agenda Map

Create a shared digital calendar linking the timelines of UNGIS, CSTD, IGF, and the WSIS Forum. This simple step would prevent overlap and make it easier for outcomes in one venue to inform the next.

2. Thematic Bridges Across Processes

Identify a few cross-cutting themes — such as AI governance, data, inclusion, and digital capacity-building — and ensure that each mechanism contributes its perspective:

• CSTD provides policy recommendations,
• IGF facilitates dialogue and community input,
• WSIS Forum showcases implementation,
• UNGIS connects it across the UN system.
  
  

A short annual “WSIS Ecosystem Synthesis” could capture these linkages.

3. Shared Knowledge Repository

A joint online hub for reports, outcome documents, and best practices would make the wealth of WSIS-related knowledge accessible and cumulative.

4. Structured Feedback Loops

Each body’s outcome documents could include a section titled “Relevance for Other WSIS Processes.” A small but powerful gesture to ensure outputs are not isolated.

5. Cross-Representation and Joint Sessions

Regular briefings among the four secretariats and a rotating “WSIS Ecosystem Dialogue” session at one major annual event would enhance visibility and reinforce complementarity.

6. A System-Wide Synthesis Report

UNGIS could prepare an annual Digital Cooperation Synthesis Report, drawing on inputs from the CSTD, IGF, and WSIS Forum. This would serve as a single, coherent reference point for policymakers and stakeholders.

Why It Matters

At its core, the WSIS architecture is not simply a collection of meetings and reports — it is a rare, living example of trust-based global cooperation in the digital domain. And in today’s fractured geopolitical environment, that trust is more valuable than ever.

1. Trust, Continuity, and Institutional Memory

The WSIS processes have operated continuously for over two decades, guided by the same set of principles and commitments endorsed by the entire UN membership. That continuity has built institutional memory, procedural fairness, and — perhaps most importantly — trust.
Participants know the WSIS ecosystem. They know how to engage. They know that the outcomes, while not legally binding, are legitimate, transparent, and grounded in multilateral and multistakeholder dialogue.

In an era where digital governance is often contested — where new initiatives must constantly prove their neutrality and legitimacy — the WSIS architecture stands as a trusted space where all actors still show up. Governments from every region, private sector, civil society, the technical community, and the UN system itself all continue to invest in it because it works.

2. A 20-Year Global Consensus That Still Holds

The WSIS outcomes represent one of the few remaining global consensus frameworks on digital issues. They were negotiated by all UN Member States, supported by all major stakeholder groups, and reaffirmed repeatedly through the CSTD and the UN General Assembly.

That kind of legitimacy cannot be easily recreated. It was built painstakingly, through compromise and mutual respect. In a world where even discussing internet governance or AI regulation can fracture along geopolitical lines, WSIS remains the one framework everyone has already agreed to — and continues to respect.

This continuity is not just bureaucratic stability. It’s political capital. And it must not be underestimated.

3. Cooperation in a Fragmented World

Today’s geopolitical environment is marked by deepening divides: on data flows, AI safety, digital sovereignty, and even the norms of multilateral engagement itself. Against this backdrop, spaces of trustful cooperation are shrinking.

WSIS — through the CSTD, IGF, WSIS Forum, and UNGIS — remains one of the few arenas where dialogue still happens constructively across political and economic blocs. It has demonstrated that multilateral and multistakeholder approaches can coexist and even reinforce one another.

That coexistence is precious. It shows that cooperation on digital issues is still possible — that the digital domain can be a bridge, not another fault line. In many ways, WSIS may indeed be the last globally agreed architecture for digital cooperation we will have for some time. That alone makes it worth strengthening, not sidelining.

4. A Proven, Scalable Model for New Challenges

The issues have evolved — from bridging the connectivity divide to governing artificial intelligence, from ICT for development to digital transformation — yet the WSIS architecture continues to adapt and endure. The Action Lines remain relevant; the forums evolve; and the stakeholders keep coming back because WSIS still provides something few processes can: a trusted, working platform that grows with the digital age.

The WSIS model doesn’t need reinvention — it needs reimagination from within. We can make it the engine of the next phase of digital cooperation by modernizing how the ecosystem collaborates and learns. Imagine, for example:

• WSIS Digital Labs, where CSTD, IGF, and the WSIS Forum co-create real-world policy experiments — turning dialogue into evidence.
• A WSIS Knowledge Navigator, using AI to connect twenty years of WSIS outcomes, best practices, and policy debates into one searchable, living map of digital cooperation.
• Cross-Institutional Challenge Tracks, where each WSIS body addresses the same emerging issue — such as AI ethics or data for development — through its own lens, and UNGIS then stitches those insights together.
• A WSIS Pulse Index and open Data Commons, making digital progress visible, measurable, and transparent across all Action Lines.
• A Bridge Fellows Programme that rotates young digital policy professionals through the four WSIS mechanisms, creating a new generation of “WSIS natives” who think across silos.

These are not new institutions; they are new ways of working — iterative, networked, and human-centered. They show that WSIS is not a relic of the early internet era but a living infrastructure of cooperation, capable of scaling to meet the next generation of challenges: AI, data governance, digital public goods, and beyond.

5. Efficiency, Legitimacy, and Coherence

Finally, there’s a pragmatic case. Coordination within the WSIS ecosystem offers efficiency (by leveraging existing structures), legitimacy (through long-standing intergovernmental endorsement), and coherence (by linking analysis, dialogue, and implementation). These are the exact qualities that many new processes are still struggling to build from scratch.

In times of institutional fatigue and limited resources, it makes little sense to multiply platforms when the architecture already exists — trusted, proven, and globally recognized.

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