[Reader-list] fwdfyi: Frem WSF-IV (Mumbai) to ESF-3 (London)

[Patrice Riemens]

Found on the http://www.esf2004.net website, the _independent_ website 
around the upcoming ESF in London (the 'official' site is at 
http://www.esf2004.org)

Posted without permission (!). I also ran it thru a spellchecker & tided 
it the formatting up a bit ...

cheers, patrice & Diiiino!


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By 'Hugh'

Sunday, 29 February 2004

Dear all, 

I write from India, where, as some of you might know, i spent the last few
months (from October last year) working in the WSF office in the
organisation of the WSF 2004.

It has been an incredible experience! I thought i would be back in London
soon to take active part in the organisation of the next ESF, but my plans
have changed. My only chance to be with you is therefore virtual. The
first few reflections are attached below. They will be in the Newsletter
of The Friends of Le Monde Diplomatique. They are rather long notes
(around 4 pages), but the most interesting paragraphs (for this list) are
the last ones.

Hope these considerations could be of interest, I look forward to read 
your comments

See you soon
Giuseppe


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>From WSF-IV to ESF-III 

The fourth WSF has represented one of the most eventful occasion of the 
civil society in the Indian Subcontinent. The WSF-Event has seen the 
direct or indirect participation of hundreds of thousands of people from 
around the world who added up to the crowd (around eighty thousand people) 
who participated in the events, seminars, conferences, theatre 
performance, dances and music concerts during the six days of the WSF 2004 
that took place from the 16th to the 21st of January in Mumbai, India.

But the WSF is more than the Event itself: the WSF is a global Process and 
is an Organisational Structure that facilitates the gathering of thousands 
of organisations and movements from around the world to share their 
struggles and their knowledge on the effects of neoliberal globalisation.

In this brief report from Mumbai, the three aspects of the WSF will be 
mentioned to describe the creative intricacies between these three 
complementary souls of the WSF 2004. Their being so closely intertwined, 
and their recursive interaction with each other, is what has given life to 
the most interesting cultural and political phenomenon animated by the 
civil society at the global level in the past 4 years and, in particular, 
to this last Indian edition. 

Some of the specific characters of this Indian version of the WSF will be 
highlighted to tell the richness of a process that can move from continent 
to continent keeping its genuine flavour but adding to it the touch of the 
local character and specificities.

The Event

Around eighty thousand people attended the WSF 2004 in Mumbai. The WSF 
welcomed its visitors with a program of dozens of panels and conferences 
and the impressive number of 1200 plus workshops and seminars 
self-organised by the participants. 

For the first time the organisational structure of the WSF has left more 
space to the participants to organise big events like conferences and 
panels that were prerogative of the organising committee in the previous 
editions of the WSF. The choice has proved successful for at least two 
reasons.
 
1)	More space has been left to the participants to give shape to a 
WSF not simply packaged by the organisers to be used and consumed by the 
participants but organised together in a fully horizontal dynamic. The 
most important consequence of this decision has been that for the first 
time the events organised by the participants have not been completely 
shadowed by the events organised by the organisers, therefore creating the 
feeling that the WSF IS what the relatively small number of organisers 
wants it to be. The WSF is moving toward a more open organisational 
structure from, at least at this stage, the point of view of the setting 
up of the program.

2)	The other relevant reason of success of the new formula adopted by 
the WSF 2004 refers to the organisational aspect of designing such a huge 
program. The commitment of the program committee has been reduced 
considerably due to the limited number of big events that it has 
organised. This moves toward a clear choice from the part of the WSF 
organisers to reduce the dimensions of the organisational structure in 
order to avoid the concentration of responsibilities (and power) in the 
hands of few organisers with the perceived risk of transforming the WSF in 
a piloted event .hijacked. or .used. by political groups more involved in 
the process and with higher institutional knowledge in the organisation of 
huge events like the WSF. The nature of the WSF must be preserved allowing 
the smaller organisations to be active and fundamental part in the 
organisation of the WSF. In this direction the strategic choices of the 
Indian Organising Committee have to be considered an important step ahead 
in the process of building a better, more democratic and more 
participative WSF. 

Along with the partial withdrawal of the Organising Committee from the 
organization of the biggest events in the Forum, two other factors are 
distinctive of the Indian WSF: 
1) a strong commitment in involving groups and individuals from Asia and
Africa, realities for several reasons (not all to depending on the work of
the Brazilian organizing committee of the past editions of the forum)
strongly underrepresented in the first three forums in Porto Alegre; and
2) a strong commitment in bringing on this global stage the issues
that afflict Indian society (the so called biggest democracy on the
planet): in special manner the issues of casteism and communalism.

Apart from conferences and panels, seminars and workshops on all possible 
aspects of the struggle of the peoples against the ill effects of 
globalisation, an impressive cultural program has been designed by the 
organisers. Music, theatre, street theatre, dance, film, artistic 
exhibitions of all kind animated the spaces of the Nesco ground in 
Goregaon, Mumbai to stress the colours, forms, moves, and sounds of the 
struggles of the people against marginalization, injustice, war.

So much has been offered, by the organisers and by the same participants, 
that sometimes the impression of being overwhelmed by what surrounded us 
caught many of us. This feeling of not being able to catch the spirit (of 
what we thought should be the spirit of such an event) of the WSF has 
sprung some of the critiques that have been voiced by many parts.

A political convention, a carnival, a business fair? What exactly is the 
Event WSF? The three adjectives are all used in a fairly derogatory manner 
and all of them indicate that generally, from each side and from the 
perspective of each group (or group of groups) of actors involved in the 
WSF in different ways, a certain feeling of uncomfortability is widely 
shared. But what really happened in the WSF? What was actually the WSF? 

It was definitely a carnival and a space to voice and perform the 
choreographies of the struggles of hundreds of big and small movements 
from all over the world. It was a political convention in which members of 
the left parties from the four corners of the world did present their 
programmes and sought for alliances on a global scale but also tried to 
find support for the local, especially Indian, political and electoral 
fights to come. A business fair? Maybe, if the hundreds of stalls are 
looked upon with stiff criticism and if the attempts to ruthlessly market 
the colours of their own movement by activists with drums of all kinds and 
dimensions are to be seen as sterile competition between competitors more 
than as the joyful expression of the specificities of the different 
movements trying to make their struggles and their reason known on this 
extraordinary global stage. 

But if this and much more can be said of the WSF, it might as well mean 
that its nature is variable and flexible enough to escape (for now) to 
clear definition and comparison with anything else known... which is, in 
itself, an important strength. 

The process

Complex, too complex for the Indian context, it was said, to organise an 
event like the WSF in a context where not only the same concept of Social 
Forum was slightly less than completely unknown (also among the activists 
who were supposed to organize it), but where the political and social 
forces involved in the organisational process had a record of scarce 
collaboration among each other and one of high lack of reciprocal trust. 
To this, serious concerns about the non-collaboration of the local 
Maharashtrian and the central Indian governements were added. 

But the Indian organising structure set up to work on the realisation of 
the fourth WSF has shown that the WSF, as a globally shared project to 
overcome neoliberal globalization, can help put together forces of varied 
and sometimes apparently incommensurable backgrounds. To the shared aim of 
organising the WSF event, few more ingredients must be added to the recipe 
of the success of the Indian WSF: 1) the institutional experience of the 
components of the IOC, trained in the organisation of big events 
(everything is big in this subcontinent of 1 billion people), 2) the 
knowledge accumulated globally in three years of WSF organising process 
and, 3) a fierce and open internal debate at the Indian level among all 
the actors involved in the organization of the WSF 2004. 

The outcome of this components were a sophisticated institutional 
structure that sees as the decisional body the Indian General Council that 
includes all the organisations involved in the WSF process. The IGC is 
open and it has been integrated during the process by 65 more 
organisations that joined the initial 135. The members of the IGC joined 
the India Working Committee that formulated the policy guidelines to form 
the basis for the functioning of the WSF India process. The IWC consists 
of 67 organizations nominated from the IGC and is indicative of the Indian 
social, political and economic diversity. To the two bodies mentioned must 
be added the two executive bodies of the institutional framework of the 
WSF India. The India Organising Committee is the executive body of the WSF 
2004 and is responsible for organising the event. The IOC consists of 51 
individuals, each being a member of one of the eight functional groups 
dealing with the different aspects of the organizational effort. The 
Mumbai Organising Committee consists of organisations based in Mumbai that 
are represented in each functional group.

This institutional/organisational structure has proved to be instrument of 
democratic negotiation between the many different instances represented 
and part of the overall process. Moreover, this articulated structure, 
together with the international body of the International Council and 
together with the Brazilian Secretariat of the WSF are perhaps showing the 
way ahead for the building of a more consistent and more transparent and 
democratic institutional structure for the future WSFs to substitute to 
the present and often not completely able to keep the ambitious promises 
of the WSF Charter of Principles. 

The Indian organisational/implementing structure

The operational/implementing body of the WSF India has been the Mumbai 
office.  The volunteers and the paid staff of that office, actually 
implemented the decisions taken by the various bodies of the WSF India 
organisational srtucture. The Mumbai office, where who writes worked from 
early October to the end of January, was an incredible .open space. that 
managed, in between sometimes overwhelming difficulties of political, 
technical and practical nature, to make sure that all the aspects of the 
event were taken care of in the appropriate way. 

An office started by a handful of people, during the days that preceded
the start of the event the WSF Office in Prabhadevi had 37 computers
installed (almost all of them running Linux) and more than 50 volunteers
working on them coming from almost every corner of the world (deceptioning
was however the total absence of volunteers from Africa). In this
inspiring environment more than the WSF 2004 has seen his gestation and
birth.  Global alliances of individual and movements have been cultivated
in the months of the strenuous organizational work. Friendships that will
move beyond national boundaries have been started, and a compact group of
committed .global. volunteers has been trained to the organisation of such
an event. The skills and the passion, the knowledge and the enthusiasm
built and cultivated in the office of the WSF India, will definitely prove
one of the most important contributions of the Indian WSF process to the
global movement against neoliberal globalisation.

The experience of the WSF India and the organisational process of the 
ESF-UK

The WSF India has to be considered, altogether, a very successful event: 
not only for the evident outcomes of the event in terms of participation 
of individuals, organisations, and media representatives, but for the 
important contribution to the global process of the Social Forums. This 
contribution has perhaps been the most painful aspect of the process for 
the local organisers because has taken place through the exposition of a 
number of serious limitations of the WSF as a process at both the global 
and the local levels. These limitations and their exposition (often in 
blunt form) have constituted a great deal of experience and knowledge that 
has to be shared and build upon in the organisation of the next global, 
regional, and local forums. 

In what follows I will schematically mention some relevant of 
considerations on which, I believe, some reflection from the side of the 
organizers of the ESF in the UK could contribute in building up on the 
previous institutional knowledge built in the past WSFs, and in particular 
in the last one in India, moving away form the risk to repeat the same 
mistakes over and over again (as sometimes has happened in the past global 
or regional Social Forums).  

The values

The three most important values on which the Social Forums are built, are 
those, as clearly stated in the Charter of Principles, that claim for:

1)	Sustainable use of resources
2)	Even and just distribution of those resources among the 
	people of the whole planet
3)	Inclusive and participatory systems for the allocations of those 
	resources.

On these values the actual organisational effort of the world, regional 
and local social forums should be founded. In this spirit and building on 
the indications deriving from the experiences of the past editions of the 
WSFs and ESFs, the next ESF to be organised in the UK should take into 
consideration some of the following lessons so far learnt.

Reduction of the resources used

The ESF-UK should be organised during the warm season, in a smaller centre
than the capital city (possibly away from any metropolitan areas), perhaps
in the countryside, and on public land. Doing so would reduce dramatically
the use of resources due to drastic reduction of renting, construction and
running costs, according to the spirit and the letter of the values
mentioned above. To practically implement such principles, it could be
possible to imagine, plan and realise the site of the next ESF in a way
similar to that in which many of the music summer festivals are organised
in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Just and equal distribution of resources

To ensure a more just and equal access to the resources mobilised,
directly and indirectly, by the ESF, the Organising Committee should
facilitate the setting up of a camping site for all the participants with
the necessary arrangements for prefab structures or roulottes for those
who really need such facilities. IN this way there wouldn.t be any
unbearable disparity between those who (as in India en elsewhere) are
hosted in the solidarity accommodation camp. and those who are hosted in
five star hotels.

Inclusion and participation in the management of the resources mobilized

A reduced mobilisation of resources would dramatically reduce the 
organisational effort and the structure appointed for it. This would allow 
smaller organisations not to be marginalised in the actual organisation of 
the event by those with greater institutional experience (and, often, 
greater technical arrogance, in the organisation of big events) like, for 
instance, unions, parties, big NGOS, etc. This could, perhaps, also avoid 
the so called risk of NGOisation of the forums or their hijacking by 
parties as feared from different parts. Moreover, this would increase 
inclusion and participation and participation in the management and 
distribution systems of the resources mobilised

One more organisational issue

Besides the points above mentioned, one more aspect has been put in the 
foreground by the last WSF India that need to be carefully considered in 
organising the next ESF. A specific framework should be thought for solid 
and consistent knowledge building across the world and the sharing of it 
between organising committees of world, regional and local forums. A clear 
deficit in this building and sharing has been experienced in every edition 
so far of both regional and global forums (the case of Brasil being an 
exception, because the Brazilian Secretariat is, de facto, an 
institutional structure for such building of institutional and 
organisational knowledge), resulting in severe waste of resources. Lacking 
that framework, a clear effort should be done by the organisers of the 
ESF-UK to contact and/or facilitate the contact between those who were 
members of the offices staffs in the previous editions of the world and 
regional forums and those who will staff the office of the ESF organising 
committee in the UK. The experience fo those individuals would contribute 
a great deal to the new organisational effort.

The expected outcomes of such commitment would be a dramatic reduction of 
the misuse and waste of resources (human and material) experienced in the 
office structure of, at least, the last WSF, and a progressive creation of 
an alternative institutional and organisational knowledge based on the 
core principles expressed in the Charter of Principles of the WSF.


END

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Patrice J.H. Riemens
Case Postale 10.644
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know!)

Tel: +31 20 6831341 (pvt)
Fax: +31 20 6203297 (Geert)
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http://www.desk.nl/
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