World Economic Forum 2008
Call for Creative Innovation
BY Madhukar SJB Rana
The global economic, financial and political ‘movers and shakers’ (numbering around 2,500) met recently at Davos, Switzerland – as they do each year – for the World Economic Forum. The overarching theme of this year’s gathering was “The Power of Creative Innovation”.
At this juncture, it is worth pondering as to who and how many participated from Nepal? One is aware of the previous participation of two prominent Nepali business leaders, namely, Binod K. Chaudhary and Sidhartha SJB Rana.
This aside, the participants at the forum themselves were moved and shaken this time around, not, mind you, by the annual spectrum of protestors who are anti-capitalism and whom one expected, more so this time, to be out in much greater numbers and more violent. It was more due to the meltdown in the global economy caused by the US recession and the mayhem in the world financial markets. The greatest threat to the global economy as America enters a recession is the fear that if it is prolonged, the US might resort to ‘exporting’ the recession through beggar-thy-neighbour policies by sliding into protectionism.
This is particularly so with a likely victory of the Democrats with Barak Obama now very close to winning the race to the White House. Obama is strongly in favour of creating more jobs, providing better health care, protecting home owners, improving access to higher education for all and generally creating a society with greater income equality.
Caring only for American wellbeing and welfare, while being insensitive to the plight of the others as a consequence of such policies, would have a negative impact on global governance just at a time when ‘creative innovations’ are critically required to address the challenges of global stagflation in the short run and poverty eradication, energy security, water security, food security, climate change, and migration and immigration caused by the emergent demographic imbalances through the greying of the population in the long run. Failure to grapple with the economic and financial consequences multilaterally will have dire consequences on global peace, harmony and security.
This necessitates shared global strategic responsibility not just by and between the US and Europe, but also with Japan, Russia, China, India and possibly also Brazil, South Africa and Turkey – all working through the UN Security Council in a spirit of global consensus. The real creative innovation that is desirable from the Davos leaders is this: How far is it genuinely creative, as a collective forum, to be able to speed up the emergent multi-polar world so that it can take up the collective responsibility, through a common vision, to grapple with the short-run crisis without losing sight of the bigger picture – the tasks ahead for meeting long-run challenges?
Governments must cooperate. So must the private sector, which is the true architect of a global economic order and prosperity.
The private sector must lead the way towards the creation of this multi-polar world through active cross-border collaborations between them. It must also engage itself vigorously in global private-public-people partnerships with national and municipal governments to be able to grapple with both the short and long-run risks and challenges not only facing mankind but Mother Earth and all other living species that she harbours as well.
In speeding up the process of multi-polarity in a global world order, and acting uniquely through the modality of the United Nations, we will definitely be free from terrorism and fundamentalism. This is pretty obvious from the remark made by Afghan President Karzai at Davos when he actually said, “Both the American and the British forces guaranteed to me (that) they knew what they were doing and I made the mistake of listening to them. When they came in, the Taliban came in.” Imagine this coming from a staunch ally of NATO!
Yes, the World Economic Forum is right when it says we need ‘creative innovation’. The only question is has the World Economic Forum delivered it?
(Rana is a former Minister of Finance)
