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Technical Report
Championing internet accountability and digital resilience
This policy report outlines a practical agenda for strengthening internet accountability and digital resilience at a time when digital infrastructures are central to democracy, security, and economic competitiveness. Drawing on contributions from partner organisations...
Digital governance is increasingly shaped by processes that bring governments together with the private sector, civil society, the technical community and academia, yet there is little systematic evidence on how these processes actually work in practice, including on what institutional designs produce meaningful participation, what makes feedback loops credible, and where formal openness fails to translate into genuine influence. This report analyses how the European Union and its member states design and implement multistakeholder engagement in digital governance, and what lessons this experience offers for multilateral processes, particularly at the United Nations. Drawing on desk research, semi-structured interviews with government representatives, and a targeted survey of foreign ministry officials, it maps a spectrum of institutional mechanisms across the full policy cycle, from advisory councils, expert groups, and open consultations to co-regulatory sandboxes, oversight bodies, and long-term coordination structures. The study documents how these arrangements can improve policy quality, legitimacy, and implementation through predictable participation channels, transparency norms, capacity-building, and shared decision-making roles for civil society, industry, the technical community and academia. It also identifies persistent structural challenges, including skewed participation towards well-resourced actors, weak feedback loops, access and language barriers, uneven enforcement, and coordination gaps between EU and national levels. On this basis, the report distils design lessons and concrete recommendations for EU and UN actors, including anchoring engagement in clear legal frameworks, differentiating channels by policy stage, strengthening synthesis and feedback requirements, deliberately resourcing inclusion, linking global processes to domestic consultations, and piloting co-regulatory and testing mechanisms alongside intergovernmental norm-setting.