My highlights from the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos

Von: Matthias Catón
4.02.10 On Sunday the 40th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum ended in Davos. The motto this year was "Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild" and the Global Redesign Initiative (GRI) played an important part in the programme. We organized six IdeasLabs on a range of topics (Values and People, Risks, Security Challenges for the 21st Century, Economic and Social Welfare, Resources and Sustainability, New Institutional Approaches) in which thirty ideas to improve global cooperation and global governance were presented and discussed. IdeasLabs are highly interactive formats which start with brief, five minute presentations and then actively engage participants in break-out groups. The presentations will be available on YouTube soon. In the closing session on Sunday ("The Global Agenda 2010: The View from Davos") partipants discussed issues around the nine clusters of the GRI. The session was moderated by Nik Gowing from the BBC.

Insights from some of the sessions I attended

During a session on Wednesday morning on security issues the panelists discussed the idea of offering NATO membership to Russia, which some participants considered an intelligent way of solving the current conflicts between the West and Russia, even though (or maybe precisely because) it would be very unlikely for Russia to accept such an offer. The IdeasLab on New Institutional Approaches on Friday afternoon included Paul Romer's controversial idea of "Charter Cities", where well-governed, developed countries would build a new city in an underdeveloped part of the world and run it under its tutelage. Naturally, the discussion was controversial and charges of neo-colonialism where quickly raised. In a dinner on geo engineering on Friday night experts discussed whether there are feasible techniques to stop global warming other than through the conventional way of reducing CO2 emissions. They generally agreed that current technologies were not very promising, with unclear results and huge potential side effects. In the session on the global economic outlook on Saturday Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, announced an innovative initiative of his organization to use Special Drawing Rights (SDR) to fund investments in low carbon growth. A paper would be published in a few weeks, he said. If you want to know more about what happened at the Annual Meeting, here are a few links:

• Videos of on-the-record sessions (on YouTube)
• Photos (on Flickr)
• Session summaries
• Session transcripts

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