eLAC Action Plans
(a personal account)
The eLAC Action Plan (the Latin American and Caribbean Digital Agenda / Information Society Development Plan) is one of those rare and noteworthy international development public policy initiatives, which has taken on a life of its own, outgrown temporal administrations, personalities, and funding sources, and over the years has only become ever stronger and more relevant. This distinguishes it clearly among its peers. I was asked to give a short historical account of this success story, so I went down memory lane and will try my best to accurately present some background.
Let's start with the end. Five successful generations have outlived and shaped previously unimaginable technological developments for 15 action-filled years of digital development in the region:
For me personally, the journey started after I had found my way to Jorge Katz, at UN ECLAC, right around the time of the 2000 dot-com bubble. Countries had just signed their first regional vision on the emerging role of digital technology (Florianopolis, 2000), and Jorge and me spent countless hours discussing and learning about digital industrialization in the region.
Around that time, the UN decided to organize a World Summit on the Information Society (2003-2005), and the 33 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean were getting ready to find a regional position. It was approved by a Ministerial Conference in January 2003, in the Bavaro Declaration (the first draft of this declaration was born on my computer, but it received much political polishing from many sides, being the official input for a World Summit). Far-reaching issues, like the question of who governs the Internet, came to the global agenda through this declaration (the question of "multilateral, transparent and democratic Internet governance", first raised here, became an ongoing battle of interest between countries). My personal favorite quote from this early political position is "The transition to the information society shall be led by the Governments in close coordination with private enterprise and civil society", which gives much food for thought in hindsight…
Honestly, much of our research focus during these early days consisted in providing large-scale evidence to skeptics that digital technology act as a generic purpose technology, which can be used to achieve all kinds of development goals (how often were we told that "…people cannot eat computers…!"). One thing on my mind (listening to lengthy and often politically convoluted discussions), was how to fit all the different issues into a simple, coherent framework. Following the Schumpeterian tradition of an interplay between technology, social change, and policy, in 2002, I developed the cube framework (sometimes referred to as "el cubo de Hilbert", in teasing reference to the Hilbert space). It turned out to be quite useful to organize my own thoughts, provides the structure for at least the eLAC2007 plan, and 15 years later I designed an online course around it at the University of California, where it helps thousands of students every year to learn about these issues.
Back in 2002, while several of us were sitting for weeks on end in Geneva during the negotiations of the first part of the World Summit, we regularly met with diplomats from the region over lunch. It became clear that any global compromise between Europe and Africa will lead to very generic outlooks, while the concrete concerns of the region often got lost in translation. The idea was born that we should do more than just be part of a global long-term vision. During that time, Joao Carlos Ferraz joined UN ECLAC, and we started to promote the idea of creating a Latin American and Caribbean Action Plan, which will also serve as a catalyzer for the nascent national strategies in the region. At the same time, we started to collaborate with the Canadian IDRC to create a statistical Observatory, aimed at collecting data and building statistical capacities in this area (OSILAC) (before that, we had used quite unverified datapoints at the time, to get some idea where the region is at). This provided some much needed research input from a regional perspective. In the years to come, the Observatory help to design indicators that were recommended for global collection in household surveys, created a regional database that harmonized over 100 household surveys, and has ever since played a key role in monitoring the advancement of the region by providing accountability through the tracking of policy goals through hundreds of graphs and tables:
While this idea gathered momentum, the European Commission started an extensive co-operation project called, @LIS : Alliance for the Information Society. The benefits of regional cooperation became clear during a high-level European Union-Latin America and Caribbean Information Society Forum, in Lima, 2003, organized with the support of AHCIET, which was a crucial catalyzer for regional dialogue during this time, led by Paco Gómez-Alamillo, as was the UN ICT Task Force, led by Tadao Takahashi. UN ECLAC joined the effort of @LIS and took on "Action 1 of @LIS: Political Dialogue". This allowed ECLAC (who until then only had me in charge of the idea) to create a solid "Information Society Program" to support this political process and produced hundreds of research products that fostered a regional outlook on the issue. The first concrete outline of the plan that I found on my computer consists of a Powerpoint presentation that I gave with Joao at the Preparatory Conference in Qutio, Ecuador, in May 2005 (in politically correct lingo, it was called a "non-official document", situated between the chicken and the egg of a political birth…). In cooperation with the government of Brazil, the first regional Action Plan, eLAC2007, was approved at the Ministerial Confrence in Rio de Janeiro, that regional preparatory conference for the second session of the 2003-2005 World Summit on the Information Society.
eLAC2007 also created a first steering committee of the plan, consisting of a regional focal group of four countries, led by Ecuador. Looking back, some of the topics that were discussed are still future promises and more relevant than ever (like international e-gov interoperability), while others were clearly wrong aspirations (like WiMax, which was eventually leagfrogged by LTE). There were two main structural innovation in eLAC2007 that distinguished it from other similar initiatives.
Personally, I feel that the transition from eLAC2007 to eLAC2010 was crucial, especially politically. Since the Wold Summit had concluded, and the seed-funding from the European Commission was not assured for the future, the moment came to decide if this topic was important enough to become an integral part of the existing institutional mechanisms of the region. In an attempt to gather, join, and potentiate all existing political will in the region, I personally travelled to over a dozen countries in a few weeks, and we eventually organized an entire series of events in September and October 2007, culminating in an inter-institutional consultation among over 100 international institutions in the region, from the public and private sector (Joao jokingly referred to the event as "Woods-TIC", as a Woodstock of Tech.Info.Com). It followed another extensive consultation that prepared the transition from eLAC2007 to eLAC2010, a Delphi exercise involving 1,400 contributions, which was considered as "the most extensive online participatory policy-making foresight exercise in the history of intergovernmental processes in the developing world to date". The spirit of being a metaplatform to coordinate the existing efforts of international collaboration in the region was at the forefront of the effort. Concrete activities existed already, as did political interest.
With the successful approval of the eLAC2010 Action Plan at the Second Ministerial Conference on the topic in El Salvador, in February 2008, a one-time sub-initiative of a global effort had become a regional imitative with its own life. With this clear sign of interest, the European Commission extended it's support for another seed funding period (@LIS2, 2009-2012). A similarly critical moment came during the Fourth Ministerial Conference, in Uruguay, led by AGESIC and UN ECLAC, 2013, after the funding of @LIS2 had ended. It is a sign of vision, political commitment and much personal effort, that eLAC today is stronger than ever, and has become an integral part of the institutional structure of the region, exemplified by a dedicated team restlessly working at the Division of Production, Productivity and Management, at United Nations ECLAC, at its core financed by the regular budget of the United Nations.
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