Report on the World Social Forum International Council Meeting in Abuja

Teivo Teivainen


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.

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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.


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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”.

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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.

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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. 

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There were many other debates in Abuja. Some of them are summarized in a separate note on a strategy debate 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.