The mandate of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) calls for discussing digital public policy issues in order to foster sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the Internet and to facilitate discourse between different stakeholders. The Forum is further mandated to facilitate the exchange of information and best practices, strengthen and enhance the engagement of stakeholders in existing and future Internet governance mechanisms, particularly from developing countries, as well as to develop capacity.
The United Nations Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation envisages a strengthened IGF with a view to making it more responsive and relevant to digital issues, and inter alia, foresees “93.(e) Better integrating programme and intersessional policy development work to support other priority areas outlined in the present report;”.
To better respond to its mandated objectives, the intersessional work takes a form of policy networks, as multistakeholder efforts that provide in-depth expert views on broad Internet governance topics of global population's interest.
Working Modalities and way to participate
The policy networks are facilitated by multistakeholder working groups of experts, based on broad bottom-up community consultations. All policy networks are facilitated through an open, inclusive, bottom-up, consultative process. Interested stakeholders are invited to subscribe to dedicated mailing lists or contact the IGF Secretariat for more information.
IGF 2023 Policy Networks
For the 2024 IGF cycle, the following policy networks are under development. Please click on each box below to learn more about their work and how to engage.
| Policy Network on Meaningful Access |
Policy Network on Internet Fragmentation |
Policy Network on Artificial Intelligence |
Past Work and Learn More
So far, the following policy networks are implemented:
More about the concept of policy networks is available here.