President Karklins encoutered a roadblock during the Plenary on 19 September 2005 when trying to have his new GFC (Group of Friends of the Chair) formulation adopted as basis for discussion for Sub-Committee B.

In several successive interventions, the Russian Federation representative strongly opposed the integration of the modifications negotiated in the GFC (new paragraphs 10, 11 and 29), insisting on keeping the documents of PrepCom-2 as the basis of negotiation, the formulation in the GFC document being only considered as one proposition of modification among others.

The PrepCom President seemed genuinely surprised by this intervention and, expressing himself in Russian, tried to point a contradiction: Russia was an active member of the Group of Friends of the Chair and as such had accepted - by consensus - that the present formulation be transmitted to the PrepCom to become the basis for negotiation. But the Russian delegate was obviously deliberate in his position.  This single opposition, without any other comment by other delegations, was enough to prevent the necessary consensus for moving forward and adopting the present GFC text as a basis.

Upon proposal of the Chair, the Plenary then adopted the following formula: the document prepared by the Group of Friends of the Chair will be transmitted - among others - to the Sub-Committee B, and it would be up to this Committee to decide whether it wants to integrate the proposed modification in the draft - or not.

So the proposals are neither accepted nor refused; they remain in a sort of limbo up to the first discussions of the Sub-Committee B. This introduces in the mix and the issue an uncertainty that will make discussions even more complex.

This new situation will force civil society actors to ask themselves which of the two architectures they want to support. And the choice may prove difficult because each can be good or wrong depending on how it is implemented:

• the initial architecture (multi-stakeholder teams along Thematic domains, supported by international organizations, and with coordination mechanisms) would be very good if the thematic Domains are coherent and mobilizing and the multi-stakeholder teams are really nimble, transparent and effective - but it could become bureacratic if international organizations seize control of the system, set up MS Teams with "fully balanced geographic participation", and only produce annual reports through a heavy secretariat mechanism;
• the new proposals by the Group of Friends of the Chair seems to lack any substantive commitment and even evacuates the "full and effective" participation of all stakeholders and it seems much worse than the first one in that respect - but, provided some smart changes are brought into the formulations and some more constraining commitment are obtained by governments, this architecture might in the end provide a much lighter system, allowing more bottom-up emergence of initiative and their flexible coordination.

The objective in all this might well be to find a set of rules that cannot go too wrong in implementation and provides the greatest flexibility and potential for greatness if it really works.