WEF to discuss global governance changes Sunday, 30 May 2010 03:00

DOHA: Key proposals contained in a more than 600-page report to be launched at the World Economic Forum Global Redesign Summit that kicks off here today are part of an initiative that underlines the need to review traditional conceptions of global governance.

Deepened global cooperation along current lines is necessary but not sufficient.

So the focus of the report is in a way on helping develop a more multi-dimensional and inclusive approach to setting norms and generating collective action needed to succeed in addressing the market and public system collapses that have accompanied globalisation.

In a telephone briefing on the Report from Geneva, the headquarters of the World Economic Forum (WEF), on May 26, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, Vice-Chairman of WEF, and Richard Samans, Managing Director, WEF, said the Summit is not limited to discussing the global financial crisis.

The Report is unique and entitled “Everybody’s Business is to Strengthen International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World”.

According to the WEF officials, the Global Redesign Project began at the WEF meeting in January 2009 when the global financial system seemed to be coming crashing down and exposed a lack of coherent cooperative arrangements between governments, central banks and others to handle the crisis.

“Global governance was not up to the task of handling the crisis which was raging at the time. It was, thus, important to get experts from across the world to work through and develop proposals to help strengthen international cooperation in handling the crisis,” said one of the WEF officials.

Over 1,500 experts from different disciplines from across the world worked in different groups for 18 months to come up with a set of proposals on how to improve global governance across a number of key sectors.

These proposals cover diverse areas like banking and finance, trade and economy, environment, education, health and energy security, among others.

The proposals to be discussed in Doha are decentralized along smart thinking sector-wise and much less about rewriting the UN Charter, said the WEF officials.

The sectors broadly are development, economy, security and sustainability, but crucial issues like oceans and climate change, for instance, would be actively debated. As for oceans, the trouble is ignorance about problems like fishing and pollution which call for much closer international cooperation.

Similarly, what governments can do in areas like Climate Change. “The report is peppered with smart, small ideas. The challenge is to now find governments open to them,” said one of the WEF officials.

“They could pick some ideas and work on them and incorporate into the works of the G-20, the World Bank or International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example.” Experts at the Doha meet are to face government questioners. It is for the governments to think if these ideas are useful.

Samans, though, clarified that these are the common threads that emerged from the Global Redesign Project and that there was less focus on construction of new international norms.

One of the useful suggestions that have emerged from the proposals in quite a number of diverse fields is the need for multi-dimensional approach and multi-stakeholder and inter-state cooperation. Issues like oceans, water and weapons of mass destruction and their proliferation thereafter are crucial, for instance. The Report emphasises actors including governments as also businesses and other sectors of civil society.

The Report sheds light on a couple of systemic opportunities before the world. Environment is one of the areas. There is the opportunity for the world to upgrade international environmental governance, for example.

The need for informal groups to discuss these proposals in detail is necessitated by the fact that G-20 leaders are hard-pressed to do so in their brief meetings and they mostly devote time to agreeing on a communique.

It, therefore, needs space for parallel thinking, said a WEF official during the telephone briefing where questions from media persons from Doha were also answered. Although the Redesign Project began much earlier, some proposals in the Report also pertain to the ongoing debt crisis in Europe, the officials said.

The summit here is being hosted in collaboration with the government of Qatar.

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