From a Global Informatics Order to Informatics for Development: The Rise and Fall of the Intergovernmental Bureau for Informatics

Based on a critical analysis of archival material and interviews, the paper redraws the little known history of the Intergovernmental Bureau for Informatics (IBI) and its role in the early international debate on digital technology. The organisation was created in the early 1960s and eventually ceased to exist in 1987, in a moment when computer technology became increasingly important as a means for communication. The paper shows how informatics and digital technology moved from a matter of little political disagreement to a highly politicized subject, increasingly linked to questions of national sovereignty and transnational dependence. Besides this political dimension of early debates on ICTs, the paper more generally underlines how the issue of access slowly moved from gaps in the implementation of national computer infrastructures to a wider debate on the informatization of society as a whole. It demonstrates how the initial techno-deterministic perspective on informatics evolved into a more societal perspective on information, leading to a new development paradigm around ICTs, where the dissemination of technology is not an end in itself, but an instrument to foster human exchanges. This perception paved the way for an alternative discourse on ICTs, which we could witness during the civil society involvement at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and in other recent debates on communication and Internet policies.