I was asked to participate in panel that posited a series of questionable propositions as its starting point. “Regulation was becoming less relevant; ITU had done a good job building regulatory capacity; now it needed to find new things to do” is a rough paraphrase. We have now fully emerged from an environment where service and carriage were tightly related, and where regulation was self-contained within a single organisation. New dimensions today include some where the ITU is a participating entity in a broader formal regulatory canvass, and some where facilitation relies on multi-stakeholder freewheeling market forces such as are associated with the Internet. This represents a challenging cultural change for the ITU to establish its active participating role.
Many who engage with Communication Policy Research south (CPRsouth), our primary vehicle for capacity building, are associated with the field of communication. It is a wide, sprawling field, which has experienced significant growth in Asia in recent times. An enterprising graduate student took the trouble to poll senior scholars on what they believed to be the most important task for communication scholarship. The responses are here. My views are also included.