From Mumbai to Davos

Reflecting back on a week of high-powered seminars and panel discussions, rubbing shoulders with CEOs and world leaders, and the highly-charged dinner and cocktail party circuit, the one thing that I could not help but take away from the experience was how it was so similar to the WSF in so many ways.

On the surface, the two events could not have been more dissimilar, and the WSF touts itself as the counterpoint to the World Economic Forum (the official title of the annual gathering at Davos. The WEF is an invitation-only exclusive club of roughly 2,000 of the most powerful and influential men and women on the planet, mostly politicians and CEOs with a smattering of "cultural leaders" and media personalities thrown in to round things off. Security is stratospheric and the luminaries present this year included Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Thabo Mbeki, and Bill Gates.

This all seems a far cry from the WSF which was a riotous assembly of close to 200,000 activists and radicals of every shade and stripe. The participants there ranged from trade unionists to indigenous rights groups to street activists from as far away as New York and Sao Paolo to social workers and educators and anyone else with a pulse and a conscience.

But apart from the demographic make-up of the participants and the contrast between the dusty squalor of the Mumbai suburb of Goregaon where the WSF was held and the manicured five-star luxury of the beautiful Alpine village of Davos, the similarities between the two events were striking.

I wouldn't say that I had come to Davos fully buying into the WSF critique of the WEF: that it was an exclusive club who's function was to manipulate control of the levers of political and economic power in an attempt to maintain the privileges of the elite, but I certainly came with a fair degree of scepticism and ironic detachment.

Last year when I interviewed the Bangladeshi head of Amnesty International Irene Khan at the WSF, she looked a little abashed when I asked her where she was heading to next, before whispering confidentially that she was on her way to Davos, but please not to tell anyone at Mumbai that! This time we greeted each other in Davos less conspiratorially, but there was still a small sense of amusement and embarrassment that we were both part of this festival of privilege.

However, as soon as I arrived in Davos, I found my pre-conceived notions of the forum and its functions being challenged.

The first major event on the opening day of the forum was billed as a Global Town Hall, and as I had been roped in as something called a Table Facilitator, I had a ring-side seat to see how it unfolded.

Almost half of all participants -- approximately 800 at final count -- took part in the programme (simulcast to millions around the world) which consisted of eighty tables of ten participants each discussing and answering questions about the focus of that year's forum, entering their answers via a touch-pad, and having the information processed, summarized, and distributed in real time. The idea was to get a snapshot of how the 800 participants thought about the issues that confronted the world community.

The table I was running included the Pakistani head of Habib Bank, an American partner from Bain & Co., a Slovenian banker (and her husband), an Indian CEO, a Japanese social entrepreneur, and two ministers from Jordan.

At the end of the programme it seemed that the conclusions we had reached at our table were fairly representative of discussions that had been going on elsewhere in the room. The most important issue that the world needed to address, according to the participants, by quite a significant margin, turned out to be poverty. Poverty was followed by equitable globalization, global governance, climate change, health, and the Middle East.

This from a crowd that was roughly 50 percent businessmen and women and mostly from Europe and North America.

Not bad I thought. But this was merely the beginning.

The next day there was the much-written about panel discussion on Africa and the G-8 featuring Bill Clinton and Bono (as well as lesser luminaries such as Tony Blair and Bill Gates). This was followed in the coming days by high-profile panel discussions on the subject of debt relief and health and absolute poverty alleviation.

To be sure, the dispossessed and the marginalized were not in evidence at Davos, but their issues were front and centre. I know many people will argue that that is precisely the problem, and that issues such as poverty and health cannot be solved in Davos because any such solution will continue to shut out the voices of those most deeply affected, and that the real problem is the fact that power will remain concentrated in the hands of people like those who get invited to Davos in the first place.

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

In the first place, the fact that those at Davos wield actual power should be an argument for the effectiveness of the forum, not an argument against it. The one drawback of the WSF from my perspective was that very few of the participants were in a position to bring about the fundamental reform that all felt was so necessary. I am sure that they went home and implemented a great deal of micro-level change for the better, but the macro-level situation in their countries most likely stayed the same.

But it was more than that. At Davos with the global elite I had a strong feeling that the world has turned a corner. It is possible that the catalytic agent for this was the recent tsunami that killed close to 200,000 people and brought graphic images of death and destruction into the living room.

The sense I get is that globalization -- for all its good and ill -- has certainly had one indisputable benefit. It is now simply no longer possible for those in the first world to shrug off issues that do not directly affect them as not being their concern. Globalization has made it clear that the fundamental problems faced by the developing world such as poverty, Aids, safe drinking water, malaria, etc are everyone's concern. It is not only markets and labour -- what is being globalized is the concept of responsibility -- and it was this sentiment that found expression at Davos.

It is possible that I have fallen for a smart confidence game and that the big words and bold visions on display at Davos will never see the light of day. It is possible that the commitment of world leaders and CEOs to tackling the real issues of disempowerment and inequality will last only so long as the cameras are on them.

But I sense something different. I heard US Senators and European ministers and captains of industry use language I had never heard before from people like them. I heard them use words such as "moral obscenity" to describe the fact that a billion people live on less than a dollar day and that malnutrition and disease stalk the developing world like a predator. I got the sense that we are on the edge of a global shift in terms of consciousness and that the world is finally waking up to the fact that when it comes to the fundamental problems of our troubled times that we are all in this together.

The World Economic Forum developing a social conscience? Who knows -- maybe another world is possible after all.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor of The Daily Star. This piece is the first of a series.