coordination with international or foreign partners or other public stakeholders is needed. The regulator will primarily be responsible for matters closely related to its existing areas of responsibility, where addressing such matters needs substantial economic, technical and/or legal expertise in the ICT area, especially where the long-termism and sustainability of activities are important. While the respective roles of different bodies must and will be respected, and due care will be exercised not to undermine independence and impartiality of the regulator, the Government will seek to ensure that overall consistency and effectiveness of the Government (in a broad sense) actions are achieved. Importantly, the requirements set out above should apply not merely to the regulation of telecommunications, but with respect to any regulation of private sector activity (including radio and television broadcasting, electronic signatures etc.). In order to achieve this as well as to ensure maximum cost-efficiency and effective utilisation of regulatory expertise, the Government, in accordance with the multi-sector collaboration approach, intends to review the current regulatory structure for ICT and related sectors, including utility regulation, general competition protection and consumer protection. The Government considers that requirements of impartiality with respect to market players and other stakeholders, applicable to regulatory bodies, should also apply to bodies involved in the policy making, especially the Minister responsible for ICT and Telecommunications and the Office of the Chief Government Information Officer (OGCIO). In this regard, such bodies will generally restrain from pursuing any activities that could potentially compete with private players in the ICT sector. This concerns ownership (including shareholding and board membership) functions in relation to telecommunications service providers and other ICT market players, as well as direct implementation of such projects (e.g., development of competing telecommunications networks). Where such functions are exercised by the Government, it will aim to do so at a sufficient “arm’s length” The Government appreciates that the size of Vanuatu together with rather challenging market conditions… make it important to explore and implement ways to reduce costs of services by enhancing economies of scale.” from the sector policy making bodies, or, at least, to design and implement appropriate safeguards to ensure that potential conflicts of interest would be avoided in practice and that stakeholders would be sufficiently assured of this. The main such safeguard is transparency—i.e., providing stakeholders with as much information as possible on the rationale of specific decisions. Administrative arrangements (e.g., involving appropriate third parties in decision making; conducting public consultations before decisions are made) are also useful. The Government considers that efficient and effective policy making requires that a policy maker is sufficiently resourced and has appropriate expertise available to it. It will therefore appropriately strengthen the OGCIO as well as ICT-policy-related administrative capabilities in other Ministries and Government Departments. Noteworthy, procurement of telecommunications and other ICT services and Approaches and Principles 41