Some Issues from the World Social Forum International Council meeting January 2005, Porto Alegre, Brasil

Ruby van der Wekken, NIGD

1. Methodology

This years WSF 2005 did not see any WSF centrally organized events. The new metholdogy of the WSF was based on the self organizing capacities of its participants. The space the WSF offered was divided according to the 11 thematic themes which were the result of a previous internet consultation process.

The WSF activity registration database on the internet was developed to make it possible to identify organisations planning to work on similar issues at the WSF. This was done to facilitate a subsequent agglutination (merging) of activities around the same themes in order to stimulate increased dialogue, cooperation and joint action.

At the IC WSF IC meeting in Porto Alegre, Fátima Melo (ABONG) gave a presentation on the new methodology of the forum, and said that the fusing of events had not taken place to as great an extent as hoped for (and comments were heard as “if fusion did not take place on a large scale, we failed”). There were also some technical difficulties in effecting agglutination on the database. The WSF did however effectuate a merging of themes and events where the conditions were mature enough for this to happen.

Melo noted furthermore that due to the new methodology some thematical areas perhaps became very homogenized by the more organized movements. Vinod Raina (Jubilee South Asia Pacific) commented at a later stage during the short methodology working group session that a question mark was whether the new methodology was effectively leading to horizontal dialogues or to hierarchical sectoral orders.

More coordinated efforts certainly took place during WSF 2005. Instead of perhaps eliminating events, some groups of partners instead decided to hold a maximum of joint events.

2. WSF 2006.

The International Council was presented with a Brasilian proposal to have a decentralized forum in several places instead of one main WSF for 2006. This proposal, which drew a more or less apparent consensus, led to an official decision on a decentralized WSF for next year.

Azril Bacal (Paolo Freire Institute, Sweden) commented during the IC that indeed, “the Forum needs to take root in local experience where there is transformative potential.”

Comments during the meeting emphasized that the different fora need to be determined by the regional forum processes themselves and that as such the decentralization should not happen whilst becoming more centralized. This for instance in relation to the dates of the fora. Some however spoke out in explicit favor of holding the decentralized fora at the same time as Davos.

Candid Grzybowski (IBASE) commented that the WSF can not leave the space empty which it occupies at the moment and Antonio Martins (Liberdade Brasil) said that the WSF must not become accused of not being able to organize itself each year.

According to Carola Rijntjes (Economia Solidar) a decentralized WSF will certainly have more impact. She put forward the proposal to have 11 thematical fora, to also fascilitate the campaigns. When discussing this idea on other occasions, most seem to be concerned about the resulting fragmentation. However others, as for instance Lidy Nacpil (Jubilee South, Phillipines) said during a debt meeting to welcome such idea as people anyhow mostly stayed in their thematical areas throughout the forum. The forum was indeed fascilitating a sort of community building per theme, as meeting, eating, relaxing was in almost every area possible. The physical distances between thematical areas in the heat of those days in Porto Alegre were also considerable.

The assumption currently going around (i.e. not an official IC decision), is that there will be three "main" WSF events (Venezuela being the most fixed one; Morocco and India being the probable other two), and none in Europe (the ideas behind that are that Europeans could go to Morocco; and also, the European social forum will be held so soon afterwards so that it does not make sense to make a major WSF event in Europe in January).

3. WSF 2007 in Africa

WSF 2007 will be held in Africa. During the IC meeting, African representatives stressed that the WSF IC should not attempt to decide what should happen in Africa, but that, as Taoufik Ben Abdallah (Enda) put it, the WSF IC should allow the forum of Africa to be made by Africa. In the past , also the WSF IC attitude towards an Indian WSF had been seen as “colonial” and many saw the move to India as a risk to the WSF process.

4. WSF expansion

A proposal from India on WSF expansion is to be discussed in the expansion commission of the IC and then brought again forward during the next IC meeting.

5. Annual WSF?

At various moments some protest could be heard about the fact that the issue of whether or not there should be an annual WSF was not discussed. By those, the deciding on a dispersed WSF 2006 is not solving the question of whether the WSF should be held every year, a question which was postponed in the IC spring 2004 in Italy, but now left un answered.

7. Other issues

Various other issues surfaced during the two IC meeting days. So was spoken of a re-masculanisation of forum, on how the panels predominantly consisted of white men above 45. Someone else commented that many representatives in the IC are above 50.

Also the subject of the workings of the IC itself once again surfaced. Also during this meeting the lack of a decision making structure lead sometimes to intervention upon intervention, which this time for instance resulted in hardly any time left for the working group sessions.

See the decisions of the WSF IC meeting Porto Alegre 2005.