Cogburn, Addom, and Mwangi – Gender in Global ICT Governance
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GENDER IN THE GLOBAL GOVERNANCE OF ICT:
A DESCRIPTIVE EXPLORATION OF WOMEN IN TRANSNATIONAL POLICY
NETWORKS IN THE UN WORLD SUMMIT ON THE INFORMATION SOCIETY
INTRODUCTION
The fiftieth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (27 February -10 March
2006) that reviewed the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action observed that governments
have introduced measures to increase the participation of women in various levels and processes of
decision-making, as well as progress in getting women into positions of power. In fact, True and
Mintrom (2001) suggest that a majority of the world’s governments have now instituted mechanisms
for mainstreaming gender into national policy. Some would argue that this progress is in large part
due to women’s transnational advocacy efforts, but what about the advocacy of gender issues at the
level of international regime formation?
Political scientists, international relations, and communication scholars have been trying at
least since the early 1960s to understand the underlying mechanisms that facilitate international
cooperation and collaboration in global policy processes (Gourevitch, 1978; Krasner, 1983;
Keohane, 1984; Axelrod, 1985; Keohane & Nye, 1989). Several potential contributing factors have
been identified, including economic power and military might (Keohane, 1984; Keohane & Nye,
1989), agenda setting (Schattschneider, 1960; McCombs and Shaw, 1972; Kingdon, 1996), and most
recently global or transnational policy, advocacy or issue networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998;
Slaughter, 2001; Haufler, 2001; Rischard, 2002).
Of the multiple and complex institutional processes shaping the emergence of a new
international regime to provide global governance for information and communication technologies
Convention