Partners or Pawns?: The Impact of Elite Decision-Making and Epistemic Communities in Global Information Policy on Developing Countries and Transnational Civil Society.

This paper explores the complex institutional processes that comprise the global governance of cyberinfrastructure and examines the impact of these elite regime formation processes on developing countries and transnational civil society organizations. Based on a concurrent, mixed-methods study of the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), we find that policy-actors from developing countries and civil society organizations have been less effective than other actors in influencing these processes. Finally, we recommend future research on the use of ICTs to strengthen the effective participation of developing countries and transnational civil society organizations in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]