February 19, 2001

Common Ground

Davos and Porto Alegre: Mirrored Events?

By Dan Esty and Mark Ritchie

Media pundits had fun last month portraying two major global meetings at Davos and Porto Alegre as totally opposed events symbolizing an unbridgeable divide between those who favor globalization and those who oppose it. But our joint experience – one of us at Davos and the in other in Porto Alegre -- tells us that there is more to the story.

In Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum gathered business, political, and nongovernmental leaders representing many of the most powerful corporations, countries, and organizations on the planet. The World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, brought together a diverse set of social, political, and business leaders and activists from 120 countries. In our post-meeting conversations, we discovered that although these gatherings took place thousands of miles from each other and were perhaps even further apart on the how to pursue social well-being, some striking similarities emerged in terms of the understandings advanced about the current global situation and the urgent need for action to address problems at a worldwide scale.

For example, at both events, global governance – and the lack of functioning institutions to manage interdependence -- were hot topics. Conversations in both Forums highlighted the shortcomings in process and output of the major economic institutions – the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. While the Davos crowd looked mainly for ways to reform these institutions, there were voices calling for more radical reform. In Porto Alegre, while a clear majority favoring the dramatic restructuring or even abolition of these entities, key discussions centered on what sort of institutions we need to manage global economic forces.

In both Forums, the ecological interdependence of all people on the Earth emerged as a critical focus. Each event featured proposals to address climate change and debate over how to overcome the current deadlock in negotiations. The need to find ways to advance worldwide collaborative action to deal with global-scale environmental threats clearly unites people across national and ideological boundaries. While there remain difficult issues to be sorted out, the common interest in avoiding climate-related disasters – such as Hurricane Mitch, which killed thousands and inflicted billions of dollars of damage on Central America in 1999 — looms large.

In both Davos and Porto Alegre, human rights issues were the subject of plenary speeches, workshops, and hallway conversations. In some cases, the concern centered on government-inflicted human rights violations; in other cases, the emphasis was placed on abuses attributed to transnational corporations. But what was striking was the common concern about the drift away from a commitment to the fundamental principles captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a baseline moral foundation for all democratic societies regardless of the details of their political or economic policies.

Many intense, even bitter, debates rage between the forces gathered in Switzerland and those assembled in Brazil. But a shared belief that what is happening at a global level matters – be it economic, social, or ecological – spans the divide, as does a desire for a more refined architecture of global governance that is more accountable and performs better. Multinational corporations may not embrace the idea of global regulation any more enthusiastically than they have welcomed local or national governmental supervision. But some modern business leaders understand that international standards make sense in the highly interdependent, competitive, and sometimes fragile world (California’s energy crisis being an example of all three phenomenon) in which we live today. At the same time, grassroots organizations and community political leaders increasingly recognize, albeit reluctantly, that some of portion of local control and sovereignty needs to be ceded to global institutions if we are to have any hopes of a coordinated response to inescapably global issues such as climate change, transnational Mafias, or predatory currency devaluations.

Another striking similarity across the two Forums was the theme of leadership – or lack thereof. With so many international pressures and issues at a critical stage, there emerged a palpable sense that the current laissez-faire approach to world affairs isn’t good enough. From Davos to Porto Allegre and everywhere in between, people see significant global challenges that demand careful attention and action, including, most notably, the need for serious and systematic restructuring of our system of global governance. The lack of vision and ambition in response leaves many disquieted. Strong leadership to address the urgent matters that were central to the dialogue in both Brazil and Switzerland is plainly required.

The good news from both the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum is the sweeping commitment, evident at both events, to finding real solutions to real problems in this real world. We need the best minds from both major global gatherings to continue to develop new strategies, new commitments, and new initiatives to tackle global challenges. Open and vigorous debate within each Forum and between the two is vital to this task.

Our hope is that the media will dig deeper and go beyond the sound bites and graphic images of conflict to extract and more accurately reflect the important thinking that is taking place. The challenges ahead demand intellectual discipline, analytic rigor, and focus with an emphasis on finding fresh foundations upon which new structures to support a better world can be built. Surely the dramas of global problems merit a better telling than a Manichean soap opera of good and evil.

Dan Esty is a professor of law and environmental studies at Yale University and currently a visiting professor at INSEAD in France. Mark Ritchie is president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. Although their world views and political perspectives are often very different, they collaborate as principals in the Global Environment & Trade Study.