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WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: Seeking Ways to Include the Excluded

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Jan 20 2005 (IPS) - While civil society activists would like to see a wider spectrum of representation at this year’s World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the participant profile will undoubtedly be much the same as at previous editions, composed primarily of a highly educated elite, with the large majority hailing from the host country itself.

“I don’t think the fifth World Social Forum will be anything other than the summer school it has always been, or that there will be a greater presence of the genuinely excluded,” said Heinz Dieterich, a German sociology professor and author based in Mexico.

In 2003, a study conducted by the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE) revealed that the majority of participants in past World Social Forum (WSF) meetings held in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre had a high level of formal education, with a preponderance of university students or graduates and academics.

The study’s results spurred the event’s organisers to seek ways to remedy the situation at this year’s Forum, taking place Jan. 26-31.

“We are making efforts to include more representatives of excluded sectors, people with limited financial resources, but there will still be relatively few, and we probably won’t succeed in changing the participant profile at this edition of the Forum,” said IBASE coordinator Érica Rodrigues in a telephone interview with IPS.

IBASE has managed to gather 20,000 dollars to finance the attendance of 40 community leaders from poor neighbourhoods in Brazil at the upcoming Forum, which is returning this year to the same venue as its first three editions. Last year’s fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, and attracted a more heterogeneous group of participants.

This financing is part of the Solidarity Fund created two years ago to make it possible for people with limited resources to attend the meeting. According to Rodrigues, however, the initiative has failed to “mature”.

“We will soon see who is able to attend the upcoming meeting, but I really can’t say that the participant profile will be very different,” she said.

The WSF is annual gathering of civil society representatives, held as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, which brings together the world’s political and business elite in the Swiss resort town of Davos every year.

While one of the aims of the WSF is to give a voice to the world’s poor and excluded sectors, there are very few actual members of these groups who can afford to travel to Brazil to take part in the event.

At the three previous Forums held in Porto Alegre, the total number of participants was around 170,000, and the proportion of Brazilians was 86 percent.

Over 73 percent of participants in the 2003 WSF were either university graduates or students, while scarcely one-third were affiliated to a political party, according to the IBASE study.

Mexican activist Héctor de la Cueva, a spokesman for the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a coalition of civil society organisations from throughout the Americas, announced that there would in fact be new participants at the upcoming Forum in Brazil.

“But not in the numbers that some of us hoped for,” he told IPS.

“There is an awareness among the social movement and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that we need to open the Forum up more to excluded sectors, and we are taking measures towards that goal, but we still have a long way to go,” he said.

Unlike the last WSF held in Porto Alegre, in January 2003, the upcoming meeting will be held far from the city’s university campuses, he noted. He believes the result will be fewer university students and more representatives of marginalized social sectors among the participants.

Once again, however, the vast majority of those in attendance will be Brazilian, with an intermediate or high educational level, said de la Cueva, who will be taking part along with another 100 Mexican delegates.

Both Rodrigues and De la Cueva noted that last year’s WSF in Mumbai proved that it is possible to include a wider range of socio-economic groups in these meetings.

A great many members of poor and marginalised sectors in India took part in the Forum in Mumbai.

According to Dieterich, the largely elitist profile of the participants in the meetings held in Porto Alegre, along with the lack of any firm political commitments or statements, have led to a progressive loss of “usefulness and viability” on the part of the WSF in general.

“The World Social Forum has to move beyond a summer school towards becoming a school of life,” he said.

Dieterich, an outspoken defender of the governments of leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and socialist Cuban President Fidel Castro, believes that the WSF should openly speak out against the “imperialist” policies of the United States.

De la Cueva, however, said that this is not a possibility, because “the Forum is an open, diverse and horizontal space for reflecting on globalisation and seeking alternatives. It isn’t a meeting of a political party or trade union organisation, where final declarations can be issued.”

Nevertheless, he added, WSF participants need to adopt more “down-to-earth and concrete” stances, which translate into action.