Global Agenda Council ready to start work

Dubai: "All the world's governance systems are entrenched in the twentieth century," said Andre Schneider, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of the World Economic Forum.

He pointed out some have memberships based on the political situation in the 1950s, and others that were designed to looking at issues that were important in the 1960s and 1970s, but are not longer relevant.

"The World Economic Forum has a unique opportunity to make proposals on how to reform the world's governance institutions. The WEF has the all-important multi-stake holder groups which are essential for such cross-functional thinking. This is why we created the Global Agenda Council, GAC, which is the intellectual bed for doing something like this reform," said Scheider.

"We have about 75 topics collected into related themes, and of the over 1,000 GAC members, 30 per cent are academic, 30 per cent from business, and just under 10 per cent from government. Out of the remaining 30 per cent, six per cent are from the media and many others from NGOs [non-government organisations]. This kind of mix means that they will look for bottom up ideas on how to change things. And avoid what is already being done," said Schneider.

Looking ahead, he expects the Dubai GAC meeting to come up with "some concrete proposals for where the world's governance is lacking, or where new institutions need to be created."

These ideas will then be taken to the Annual Meeting in Davos, "where we will do a stress test of the ideas, since all the top stake holders from business, from government, etc will be present, and we can get their input," he said.

"Then we go to Qatar in the spring for the GRI [Global Redesign Initiative] meeting, after which we start the process of disseminating the ideas to the institutions and to the public."

The GRI is not just about influencing world leaders. The World Econ-omic Forum will also take the ideas out to the public to build public opinion in favour of the changes that will be recommended. "In parallel with the Annual Meeting, we will share these plans with the public at large.

"We hope to push where there is not much being done at present," explained Schneider.

"For example, the GRI process will not look at reform of the UN Security Council, since many people are already looking at that issue. It does not need us to duplicate what is already happening. But we will look at ideas where there is a real need for public-private collaboration."

"But the sort of thing we will look at is like when we worked with Gordon Brown on his proposals on ecological development, which came up at the New York meeting of the UN on the environment. By including substantial private sector involvement in developing the idea, meant that the proposal becomes easier to implement and moves forward much faster. That is what we are all about," said Schneider.

"Another example of the sort of the debate that the GACs can manage well is about whether growth is important. Growth exists, and growth destroys or reduces natural resources. But there are two schools of thought on how to cope with growth. One is more innovative and says that growth can continue because we will find more and more ways that will reduce the use of resources or the impact on the Earth. The other end of the argument is that everything is finite, and therefore 50 per cent of the achievements of the developed world will need to be transferred to the developing world. These are two extremes, and we will seek to build something in the middle," he said.

"As we come close to Copenhagen, there will be a very important debate on climate change. If dealing with climate change is seen as a punishment, then nothing will happen. In part this is why Kyoto did not really work. It created a lot of nice promises, but it did not ensure sustainability nothing really worked and it was not effective.

"The perfect world solution from Copenhagan is that it will build an efficient institution, that will deal with climate change, that will be based on a value that is a recognition of a common good, that transcends all national interests. There are common goods that transcend all national values. But there are many national interests that will not subscribe to such an idea and they need to be incorporated, and also recognise the global values as their own.

"The day that we accept that there are global common goods that transcend national values, will be the day that we can go somewhere," said the optimistic Schneider. "In order to advance peace and security, we need to define common values: that we can all aspire to a peaceful life. I know this is very idealistic, and we need a pragmatic underpinning. That is what the World Economic Forum can do."