The organisers of Davos have a new plan to save the world

By Katia Moskvitch

Are the World Economic Forum's Global Future Councils just talking shops or a real forum for much-needed change?

Renata Avila is no stranger to protests. An international lawyer and digital rights advocate from Guatemala, she has represented indigenous victims of genocide and other human rights abuses. Seven years ago, she stood outside the London Stock Exchange, waving placards for social justice, a fair financial system and accountability for those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Today, she’s sipping coffee at one of the places against which she would have been rioting just a decade ago – the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Avila is a participant at the forum’s two-day Global Future Councils meeting, which took place last week in Dubai. There are 38 councils trying to solve global challenges, each bringing together some 20 or so high-profile people from government, industry, academia and civil society. Avila is a member of the Human Rights and Technology Council, as one of the nearly 800 people who have come to Dubai to try and fix our broken world.

Cybersecurity, declining biodiversity, global governance, the future of virtual and augmented reality, the state of the financial system, infrastructure, information and entertainment – you name it, it’s up for discussion. Every council’s members have two days to brainstorm recommendations on making the world better – and it’s not empty talk. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be, because all the recommendations will then be presented to politicians and industry leaders at the next year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, arguably the world’s most high-profile meeting place.

After Dubai, it’s the council members who are busy putting together proposals for Davos attendees to think about – and hopefully kick into action. The purpose is to integrate “the right kinds of actors in the process that can take the ideas forward,” says Stephan Mergenthaler, head of knowledge networks at the World Economic Forum.

For Avila, it’s her first time at a WEF event. A decade ago, she says, the organisation stood for an agenda that was aimed not at the people but the elite, who were trying to consolidate their power. “But the world has got so bad that now it seems that this agenda seems less harmful,” she says. The members of her council, for example, are discussing issues such as the effects of social media on the outcome of elections and the impact of facial recognition on autonomy and freedom of individuals. The world is now edging “well beyond just consolidating the power of economic elites, we haven’t seen this since 1936,” she says. “It’s a race of an extreme right-wing agenda that resembles fascism. We are facing really dangerous times that we need to address as soon as possible.”

But will anything come out of the discussions? “Ten years ago, to get the attention of people, we had to have a big demonstration. Now the time is so extreme that if we get the attention of global leaders – even for a minute – so that they understand how serious the problem is, how serious the combination of authoritarian power and technology is that we have today, I’ll be happy. My ultimate goal would be to produce an easy to understand framing for any person in power to highlight the urgency of the issue.”

What helps is that in her council, just like in many others here in Dubai, the members are people who are most likely to grab the attention of global leaders. There are academics from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Berkley, representatives of Unicef and Amnesty International. “It will be more likely that [global leaders] listen to us than they listen to people demonstrating outside Davos,” says Avila.

It hasn’t always been like that. The WEF approach of getting people to work together, on a voluntary basis, for a year to produce a white paper or similar document, has evolved over the years. Starting in 2008 and until 2014, there were 86 councils where people would meet up for two days and then continue working together for two years, with another two-day meeting in the second year. These talks, however, produced little outcome as proposals rarely found their way into real policy or regulation, says Usha Rao-Monari, senior advisor at Blackstone Infrastructure Group, who is a veteran participant of the forum and a member of the biodiversity council. “Some 80 to 90 per cent of all councils didn’t produce any outcome at all,” she says.

A rare exception was Usha’s own initiative on water resources, which first emerged as a recommendation at the forum and later became embedded in a multilateral initiative now organised by the World Bank. Plastic waste in the oceans is another area where councils have contributed to boosting awareness, says Mergenthaler – cumulating in a joint study that warned that by 2050 there would be more plastic in the oceans than fish. “The narrative took on a life of its own, several years after the council,” he says. “There is now a UN action agenda on the oceans that brings a lot of players into the formal process.”

Keen to really make a difference, the organisers realised that there were simply too many councils, says Rao-Monari, and that the name could have been – at least partly – to blame. The members were “talking about an agenda, it was not future-looking,” she says. So the WEF renamed them as the Global Future Councils and cut back the number to a more manageable and more focused 38 councils, with a one-year deadline to get the job done. “They found the more time you gave people, the more time they took,” says Rao-Monari.

“We had a clear objective to provide input for the Davos meeting,” says Yoriko Kawaguchi, Japan’s former minister of foreign affairs and member of the Geopolitics council, of this year’s forum. She’s been to the forum before, but in a different council, focussed on Japan. This time, she says, the meeting was very productive and geared to producing results for Davos from the get-go.

While the diversity of the 38 councils showed a good spread across gender and age, the overall mix still felt somewhat wrong, with most members drawn from developed Western economies, remarks Kawaguchi. What is missing, she says, is “input from the south, from countries with other philosophies.”

The policy makers in Davos may or may not listen to the councils’ leaders (there are two per council). If they don’t this time round, the groups will continue working for the rest of the year, trying to get their message across to the wider public. That may take the form of blog posts or a Twitter campaign (the favourite tools of the biotechnology council), or a media campaign targeting journalists from global publications like the New York Times, Washington Post or BBC. “We want to create a well-informed society and population who understands the values of their data towards helping society and themselves,” says Daniel Heath, a biomedical engineer at the University of Melbourne and a member of the biotechnology council.

The question of whether the councils are mere talking shops or really going to change the world weighs on many people’s minds at the Dubai event. “We were tasked with giving strategies on how to implement our ideas,” says Sandra Wachter, a research fellow at Oxford University and a member of the council on values, ethics and innovation. “And this is where my hope comes from, that it was not just a high level and very abstract discussion about what values we have and why they are important, but that it also can be put into practice, as something that you would propose to the CEO of a company.”

Steffen Kern, chief economist and head of risk analysis at the European Securities and Markets Authority and a member of the council on financial and monetary systems, warns that it’s unlikely the proposals worked up in Dubai will immediately get translated into real action. It’s more about “giving impulses to broader policy discussions and giving impulses to the strategy building of corporations,” he says. But even impulses can sometimes be essential. Otherwise, as Avila puts it bluntly, “it’s just another meeting”./wired