[WSF-Discuss] Teivo Teivainen on IC Abuja meeting

[Madhuresh]

*Report on the World Social Forum International Council Meeting in Abuja

Teivo Teivainen
*x 
http://www.nigd.org/nan/nan-doc-store/03-04-2008/wsf-ic-abuja-teivo-teivainen-2008 


This is a brief report on the International Council meeting of the World 
Social Forum held in Abuja, Nigeria between 30 March and 3 April 2008. 
The meeting was slightly longer than the usual IC meetings, in order to 
have time to discuss strategically the future of the WSF process.

I went to Abuja to represent Network Institute for Global 
Democratization (NIGD), which is one of the founding organizations of 
the International Council. Going through the list of IC members and 
their presence in meetings, I realized NIGD had been present in nineteen 
of the twenty meetings of the IC organized since June 2001. Therefore, 
at the beginning, I started reflecting on what had changed.

**

Compared to the first meetings of the IC, when the clear majority of the 
participants were from Latin America and (Southern and Western) Europe, 
there was more geographical and cultural diversity in Abuja. When Abuja 
was confirmed as the site for the IC meeting, I heard some complaints 
that the flight connections were so difficult that people from other 
continents and also other parts of Africa would have great difficulties 
to participate. I was therefore positively surprised to find a 
relatively numerous group of participants from more parts of the world 
than I had expected.

Apart from the solidarity fund connected among the IC participants, the 
financial support provided by Action Aid Nigeria was one of the factors 
that made it possible for IC members from other parts of the South to 
participate. Of course, as always, an IC meeting can be considered 
somewhat elitists and exclusive as there are many potentially interested 
organizations who cannot participate either because they are not IC 
members or because they cannot raise the travel money.


**

One of the first things I encountered was that the debates were better 
organized than before. Too many earlier IC meetings had been filled with 
a constant cacophony resulting in the survival of the loudest. In Abuja 
the facilitators of the sessions seemed to take particular care to give 
speaking opportunities for participants from organizations and areas 
relatively new to the process. The more experienced participants did not 
stay silent, but their voices were not as overwhelmingly dominant as in 
some other meetings.

There certainly were reasons for complaint such as the fact that once 
more there was no plan to make audio recording of the plenary debates 
available through the Internet. I argued in one of my (very few) 
interventions that this lack of communicational openness gave one more 
justification for anyone claiming that the IC is a closed club. Another 
logistical problem resulted from occasional tensions with the voluntary 
interpreters from Babels network who at some point seemed willing to 
start a strike.

Overall, however, the meeting was better structured than before, which 
is positive for someone like me who has for years criticized the tyranny 
of structurelessness of the WSF process. I am convinced that the 
existence of a Liaison Committee played a role in this improvement. One 
of the novelties of the IC is that a Liaison Committee was formed during 
2007, to facilitate the efficient functioning of the process. It 
replaced the International Secretariat, which had earlier taken some of 
the tasks of the original Brazilian Organizing Committee. Even though 
the establishment of the Liaison Committee has triggered various kinds 
of critical questions related to new hierarchies in the WSF process, my 
feeling is now that its existence helps the process move forward.

The Liaison Committee consists of 11 full members and five “additional” 
members. In practice, there seems to be no significant differentiation 
between different ranks of member (apart from questions like defining 
the quorum of the Committee meetings for which either six full members 
or a total number of eight is required). In principle the Committee 
meets four times per year, twice just before IC meetings and twice in 
other times. Decisions are supposedly made through consensus, and if no 
consensus is possible the issue is taken to the IC plenary. Of course, 
true to the WSF decision-makers’ usual depoliticizing language, in its 
report the Committee also stated that it does not really take decisions 
at all, as it is “not a power structure” and plays “only a facilitating 
role”.

**

For NIGD one of themes on which we have organized various events over 
the years in Porto Alegre, Caracas, Mumbai, Nairobi and elsewhere has 
been the future of the WSF itself. Therefore it was fascinating to be in 
an IC meeting that for the first time explicitly focused on the 
strategic self-reflection of the process. Over various years, explicitly 
strategic questions, especially if the term “strategic” itself appeared, 
had been repeatedly (though not totally) avoided in the IC meetings. 
This was also reflected in the fact that the Strategy Commission of the 
IC was mostly inactive during the past years. In 2007 the Strategy 
Commission made an impressive revival and played a key part in preparing 
the Abuja debates on strategy.

As the focus was mostly on “big” strategic questions and evaluation of 
the WSF, compared to many other IC meetings there were not all that many 
new concrete and controversial points to be decided and debated. Some of 
the earlier decisions were, however, brought up. One of the few moments 
of tension in the debates was around the earlier decision to organize 
somewhere in Africa the global WSF event following the WSF 2009 of 
Belem. When the facilitators were presenting the conclusions of the 
strategy sessions and there was no explicit mention of decision to hold 
WSF 2011 in Africa, many of the African participants started protesting. 
The former said they had not debated the issue so there was no need to 
include it, whereas the latter were accusing the former of crating 
doubts on an earlier decision.

My understanding is that the decision to hold WSF 2009 in Belem was 
easier to make if it was decided simultaneously that the following 
global WSF event would take place in Africa, probably in 2011 if the 
biannual rhythm continues. As I did not participate in making that 
decision in the Berlin IC meeting in 2007, my impression around this 
issue is to a large extent based on hearsay. The stories I hear 
resemble, with many obvious differences, the way the decision to 
organize the WSF 2004 in India was made possible by deciding 
simultaneously that the following WSF 2005 would be organized again in 
Porto Alegre.

In any case, it did seem that in practice some of the IC participants 
did have doubts about returning to Africa in 2011 (or whenever the first 
post-Belem centralized forum should take place). These doubts were not 
openly stated in plenary meetings, but the heated comments by various 
African participants during the presentation of the conclusions of the 
strategy sessions made it obvious that the existence of such doubts was 
no secret to them. Taoufik Ben Abdallah, one of the key persons of the 
WSF process in Africa since the beginning, stated angrily that “if the 
strategy commission paper talks about the WSF 2009 in Belem, it should 
also talk about the following WSF in Africa since they were decided at 
the same time. Otherwise the 2009 event could take place anywhere, even 
in Vladivostok, instead of Belem”. Finally, an allusion to the earlier 
decisions including the future WSF in Africa were added to the strategy 
commission draft and the situation calmed down.

**

One part of the discussions focused on evaluating the Global Day of 
Action (GDA), organized for the first time in January 2008 around the 
time when centralized or polycentric WSF events had been organized since 
2001. Most participants seemed to have a positive opinion on the GDA 
experience. Many weaknesses were acknowledged but they were mostly 
considered something that could be overcome with more experience and 
better preparation. One of the questions was about timing: January is a 
holiday month in many places of the south, whereas it can be a cold 
winter month in the north. The timing question was not only about 
holiday or weather conditions, but also about whether the WSF process 
should delink the timing of its events from the World Economic Forum 
normally organized in Davos at the end of January. Once more, no clear 
consensus emerged on this question.

In any case, my understanding is that quite a few participants liked the 
idea of organizing a centralized WSF event every two years and a Global 
Day of Action in the years between. There has, however, been no formal 
decision to stick to the biannual rhythm beyond 2009. It does seem 
likely that the centralized WSF after Belem 2009 will take place in 
2011, but there are still people who would like to hold it every year as 
well as those who would like to organize the centralized WSF events 
every three or even four years.

Among the groups arguing for longer periodicity I regard the 
transnational peasant alliance Via Campesina the most important one. For 
the WSF process it would be great loss if Via Campesina decided to 
completely withdraw from the process because it is no longer responding 
to their expectations. Via Campesina has for many years been claiming 
that the yearly organization of centralized WSF events consumes too much 
energy needed for more concrete struggles.

**

There were many other debates in Abuja. Some of them are summarized in a 
separate note on a strategy debate 
<http://www.nigd.org/nan/nan-doc-store/03-04-2008/resolveuid/da8bdf7b896881266b821625a41465e9> 
prepared by Alejandro Bendaña and me. Others include discussing a text 
on what kind of funding can be acceptable for organizing WSF events. In 
the draft text, it was stated that the organizers may accept donations 
from private corporations taking into account the political implications 
of accepting such support. Vino Raina, from India, pointed out that such 
formulation might open the door to all kinds of problematic things, and 
I assume the sentence was changed or removed.

For the next International Council meeting, there was this time only one 
concrete proposal. It was therefore decided that it would be organized 
in Copenhagen, Denmark, immediately after the next European Social Forum 
held in Malmö, Sweden, next September.

In the strategy debates, the status of the WSF Charter of Principles was 
sometimes taken up. The conclusion, as stated on the final day reports, 
was that there did not appear to be any consensus for such amendment at 
this point of time. All in all, I found the Abuja meeting much better 
than many other IC meetings and it reinforced my belief that the process 
still has plenty of energy.