Annual meeting in Davos- invitation-only annual meeting held end of January in Davos, Switzerland, bringing together chief executive officers from its 1,000 member companies, as well as selected politicians, representatives from academia, NGOs, religious leaders, and the media.
500+ journalists from online, print, radio, and television take part, with access to all sessions in the official program, some webcast. Not all the journalists are given access to all areas. This is reserved for white badge holders. “Davos runs an almost caste-like system of badges,”
In 2011, some 250 public figures (heads of state or government, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, heads or senior officials of international organizations) including: Felipe Calderón, Robert B. Zoellick, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Nicolas Sarkozy, Ban Ki-moon, Angela Merkel, N. Chandrababu Naidu, Ferenc Gyurcsány, François Fillon, Morgan Tsvangirai, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Min Zhu, Paul Kagame, Queen Rania of Jordan, Dmitry Medvedev, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Kevin Rudd, Barney Frank, Kofi Annan, Werner Faymann, Leonel Fernández, Jacob Zuma, Naoto Kan, Jean-Claude Trichet, and Zeng Peiyan.
Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bono, Paulo Coelho, and Tony Blair also are regular Davos attendees. Past attendees include Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Henry Kissinger, Nelson Mandela, Raymond Barre, Julian Lloyd Webber, and Yasser Arafat.
Summer Davos is held annually in China, alternating between Dalian and Tianjin, bringing together 1,500 participants from what the foundation calls Global Growth Companies, primarily from rapidly growing emerging countries such as China, India, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil, but also including quickly growing companies from developed countries.
Young Global Leaders consists of 800 people chosen by the forum organizers as being representative of contemporary leadership, “coming from all regions of the world and representing all stakeholders in society”, according to the organization.
Social Entrepreneurs- WEF has been promoting models developed by those in close collaboration with the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship,highlighting social entrepreneurship as a key element to advance societies and address social problems.
Global Shapers- a global network of people between the ages of 20 and 30 who have shown great potential for future leadership roles in society...a network of self-organizing local hubs based in each major city around the world. They undertake events and activities intended to generate a positive impact within their local community. As of 11 July 2016 there are 459 Hubs with more than 6,100 Shapers.
Thirst—is an international NPO based in Beijing set up in 2011 through the Water Security Council of the WEF. The organization educates 14–24-year olds about the idea of embedded water, the water crisis
The Global Health Initiative was launched by Kofi Annan at the annual meeting in 2002. The GHI’s mission was to engage businesses in public-private partnerships to tackle HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and health systems.
The Global Education Initiative (GEI), launched during the annual meeting in 2003, brought together international IT companies and governments in Jordan, Egypt, and India that has resulted in new personal computer hardware being available in their classrooms and more local teachers trained in e-learning. This is having a significant effect on the lives of children.
The Water Initiative brings together diverse stakeholders such as Alcan Inc., the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, USAID India, UNDP India, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Government of Rajasthan, and the NEPAD Business Foundation to develop public-private partnerships on water management in South Africa and India.
The Technology Pioneers Programme recognizes companies that are designing and developing new technologies. The award is given to 30–50 companies each year. consisted of more than 400 companies from 5 continents.
Criticism -Protest marches. During the late 1990s the foundation, along with the G7, World Bank, World Trade Organization, and International Monetary Fund, came under heavy criticism by anti-globalization activists who claimed that capitalism and globalization were increasing poverty and destroying the environment. Ten thousand demonstrators disrupted the WEF in Melbourne. Repeatedly, demonstrations are held in Davos to protest against what have been called the meetings of “fat cats in the snow”, a tongue-in-cheek term used by rock singer Bono.
Globalization rationale questioned-Professor Emeritus at MIT Noam Chomsky, an American linguist and outspoken intellectual, has characterized the term “globalization” as propaganda when used in connection with trade policies advanced by the WEF:
The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term ‘globalization’ to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. ...those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become ‘anti-globalist.’ This is simply vulgar propaganda -idiotic.
Take the World Social Forum, called ‘anti-globalization’ in the propaganda system—which happens to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow highly privileged elites who meet at the competing WEF, and are called ‘pro-globalization’ by the propaganda system. An observer watching this farce from Mars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the educated classes.
Influence of financial supporters-Faculty member Steven Strauss at the Harvard Kennedy School, has raised an additional concern, pointing out that many of the WEF’s strategic partners (who in return for financing the annual meeting have the ability to set the intellectual agenda for the meeting) have been convicted of serious criminal, civil, or human rights violations, raising significant issues about the forum’s legitimacy as a neutral convener on certain topics.
>>>”Davos Man” is a neologism referring to the global elite of wealthy (predominantly) men, whose members view themselves as completely “international”. It is similar to the term Masters of the Universe, applied to influential financiers on Wall Street.
Davos men see their identity as a matter of personal choice, not an accident of birth. According to political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, they are people who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite’s global operations”. In his 2004 article “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite”, Huntington argues that this international perspective is a minority elitist position not shared by the nationalist majority of the people.
Lawrence Summers refers to this concept as the “stateless elites”, tied more to the success of the global economy than to any nation, and views it as eroding support for continuing globalization.
Source -Wikipedia.
The last few paragraphs about Davos man, Stateless elites & globalization ring true.