Davos city winter blue hour night scene. Davos, Switzerland
As the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum has just concluded in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, it is perhaps appropriate to reflect on some of the key features of this gathering in terms of ‘global order’. Perhaps we could also consider how this summit might lead us to what I have called elsewhere “Earthly Order” which is more in harmony with the laws of nature.
This is by no means the most comfortable place to hold a conference and fatigue sets in after a few days of walking on icy pavements and busing around small mountain roads clogged with traffic. However, the Davos summit is one of the few major events where the public and private sectors have an opportunity for frank talks. The Forum has a carefully curated dialogue format for billionaires and politicians, along with “thought leaders.” and increasingly includes civil society organizations as well.
Around the time of the Arab Spring, I was invited to attend the Davos meeting in 2012. The year I attended was particularly appropriate as this was the year of “Occupy Movement” and a shadow event, or “Open Forum”, was held at a nearby high school for the protesters, who had very little engagement with the main forum. Since then, this accessible event has become an important launching pad for activists and is now officially embraced by the World Economic Forum as well. Many side events continue to this day alongside the main meeting, which can often be even more refreshing.
The challenges of multi-stakeholder engagement were best demonstrated to me during a rather heated conversation on the final day of the summit with an academic practitioner from a developing country working on trade and investment issues in emerging economies. He sympathized with several prominent economists who were reluctant to attend the Forum because too many “non-experts” were allowed on the panels. Moreover, this distinguished practitioner expressed disdain for peace activists and others not directly related to “the economy” who were invited to discuss development issues.
It was very disturbing to me to learn that while the Forum tried to respond positively to a blocking criticism, it angered many such professionals with an extremely narrow view of “expertise!” Networks and their constituent nodes may be inherently decentralized to their full extent, but still have a tendency to centralize at key nodes. Just like natural monopolies in finance, there is a tendency in networks to form key nodes as wellas we have seen in the form of the rise of the big tech giants Facebook, Google and Amazon.
This grouping into nodes or even hypernodes is a manifestation of what is sometimes called “The Matthew Effect”, after the parable of the talents in Matthew’s gospel — a “winner takes all” perhaps warning: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away.(Matthew 25:29). The term was coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton (who won the National Medal of Science) to consider the impact of major awards (inc Robert C. Merton’s son won the Nobel Prize in economics). The World Economic Forum has effectively become a hyper-hub for public-private partnerships and is emblematic of the Matthew Effect.
Powerful networking platforms that provide the opportunity to facilitate the channeling of motivational energy should not shy away from disdain for alternative viewpoints. The WEF is challenged to defy the Matthew Effect and continually bring in new voices, thinking beyond big-name academics, companies and best-selling authors. This is especially true for us sustainability quest which is often more prone to “group think”. The proponents of exploiting the Matthew Effect they see success as a sign of consent, but research has shown that it can they often also stifle innovation and limit beneficial disruptive thinking.
Former Vice President Al Gore’s talk at WEF this year was particularly troubling as it was emblematic of how the Matthew effect can lead to exaggerated statements that take poetic license from science. Using his star power from the political stage, he managed to make a documentary, which won him the Nobel Peace Prize, which then guaranteed him a white card invitation to Davos – every year! Gore gave misleading information by comparing the greenhouse effect to 600,000 Hiroshima level nuclear bombs exploding every day and boiling the oceans! Such performances are easy a target for ridicule and can undermine the cause of a transition to sustainability.
It will take efforts to bring multiple perspectives and different epistemologies to the table to realign the global order in accord with the ecological order. A wide range of economic prospects, including from ecological economists (who consider physical capital to have some superiority over other forms of capital) must also be included. If organizations like the World Economic Forum lose a few self-absorbed academics in the process, there will happily be plenty of other useful professionals to take their place. It is pure nonsense to assume that data and analysis are somehow static and that the last word on economic theory has been delivered. Challenging the orthodoxy of expertise to understand the complexity of human behavior is precisely the role that organizations such as the Forum are best designed to address.
