Alternative Futures of Globalisation

* Dissertation: Alternative Futures of Globalisation. Jose Ramos. Draft May 2010

Motivation

Jose Ramos:

"All of this was underlined by a growing understanding of the systemic nature of the challenges we face. Having read books like Kenneth Boulding’s The World as a Total System (Boulding, 1985), I began to see how global problems and challenges cannot be segregated into single issues, they are interconnected in intricate and complex ways. To be honest, learning about all of these global / futures issues filled me with a sense of crisis, punctuated by moments of despair and overwhelm and I began to look for ways forward amid this landscape of challenges. I relate strongly with work done by Macy on despair (Macy, 1991) and the scholarship done by Hicks. Hicks examined the psychological process of learning about global / futures issues (Hicks, 2002), arguing we are affected by feelings of despair or frustration when facing issues that seem too big, too abstract, which can bring on a feeling of powerlessness and overwhelm, ‘psychic numbing’, avoidance and alienation. He argued we must move ourselves and students through five stages: cognitive, affective, existential, empowered, and action-oriented. While not an exact correlate, I experienced these ‘stages’ or dimensions: overwhelmed by strong emotions, despair, and anger, then grappling with my own identity and place within this new context of issues and challenges, looking for sources of hope and new pathways of change and entering into communities and projects that address these challenges. This process of re-integration has been as fundamental for my own health and wellbeing as it has been for anyone else or thing that may have benefited from my shift.

I was particularly concerned about how people in every walk of life and in various locales, most removed from centres or structure of ‘global’ power, could express agency and enact change in dealing with the global pathologies and challenges that increasingly affect us, and the structures that give rise to these pathologies. People across the world’s communities, in just facing their own ‘local’ challenges, face unprecedented complexity and scale. How does the fisherman off the coast of India face the threat of global warming and overfishing? How does the Indonesian factory worker face the impact of IMF mandated structural adjustment programs? How does the Australian, US or German farmer deal with the cross-pollination or ‘contamination’ of their crops by neighbouring genetically modified (GM) crops? I was interested in grassroots collective agency in addressing common global / trans-local challenges and shaping futures self articulated as just, peaceful and sustainable ones.

This led me toward becoming both an organiser and inquirer within the World Social Forum (WSF) process. Before I began this thesis, I participated in the WSF and became an organiser for the local Melbourne Social Forum. I saw social forums as enabling community agency in shaping a new globalisation, or “another globalisation”, and this gave me some faith and hope in our capacity to respond to the challenges that we face as communities. I carried the hope that I would be part of the construction of a global movement for social change that could effectively address the myriad problems that the world is facing today. After this, I embarked on this thesis project and made the decision to use my experiences in this process as the basis for an inquiry into how social forums and other alter-globalisation platforms and processes contribute to creating a better world; to look at social forums communities and network formations as platforms for envisioning and enacting alternative globalisations, as well as the substance of the visions of these alternative globalisations.

I quickly found out that understanding both the WSF process and literature on alternative futures of globalisation was not going to be so easy. On the one hand, I found that the actors, organisations and people that come to social forums embodied great diversity in their histories, organisation, practices of enacting change, ideological orientations and their visions for ‘another world’. The discourses at the academic level for making sense of the WSF process and articulating alternative globalisations were equally diverse. Trying to define the WSF process through only one perspective would not do justice to the richness that it represents, as the actors within the process itself articulate what they do through a variety of perspectives. I found that I needed to honour the various ways of knowing which concern themselves with understanding the WSF process, as well how they articulate a ‘different’ globalisation and I thus began to map these. I came to see that the composition of the WSF process and the body of literature on alternative globalisation as a whole was typified by complexity, in the sense of holding or containing immense diversity within common physical and conceptual space and I began to inquire into the nature of this complexity.

In the tradition of action research my methodological approach to the investigation was to be an engaged participant in the process. This entailed both participating in several WSFs, as well as organising within the Melbourne Social Forum and a number of other projects connected to the WSF as a process. This fieldwork was a process of immersion into different types of activism and community development work aimed at both sustaining and enabling networks, groups and organisations that work to create change. What I hoped to learn was how people in various communities who want to or who must grapple with 'global' challenges can participate in the transformation of our world, how popular participation extends agency into planetary issues and concerns. I aimed to understand how we might create a democratic and participatory planetary governance, so that global issues are not just the preserve of power and privilege, but the 'unqualified', the local and marginal find empowerment in this new 'planetary' complex of issues. I entered this thesis to look at how the WSF could provide some answers to these concerns. I wanted to know what enabled popular empowerment and action for people addressing the global issues that impact on their locales and hoped the forum process would give me some answers as well as the practices and strategies for enacting change. I wanted to understand what agency means for ordinary people in grappling with the complex and often overwhelming challenges they / we face, and the visions for transformation that emerge through people in it.

My journey of discovery has been both challenging and rewarding, and I invite you to join this exploration with me. I would be honoured if you would accept."

Object of the Study: the World Social Forum

Jose Ramos:

"While groups had been laying the groundwork for it for almost a decade, the WSF as an event began in January 2001, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In the tradition of counter-summits, it was a forum counter-positioned to the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF). It was held at the same time of year, but contrasted sharply with the WEF. Whereas at the WEF the global business elite came together to discuss how to further their corporate interests, the WSF was articulated as a place for those contesting corporate (neo-liberal) globalisation, as well as articulating and building alternatives to it, to come together. In response to the articulated inevitably of a neoliberal future proclaimed by the pundits of corporate globalisation (Friedman, 1999; Fukuyama, 1989), the WSF’s slogan became ‘Another World is Possible’.

By establishing an ‘open space’ methodology, in which those groups interested in holding a workshop at the WSF could do so, and anyone with an interest could attend, forums swelled with participants. The WSF began to bring together an ever-widening diversity of groups, from social movements, to INGOs, to networks, across a wide variety of themes. In response to the popularity of the forum, whose attendance seemingly grew exponentially, from 10,000 in 2001, to 50,000 in 2002, to 100,000 in 2003, a WSF charter emerged to give vision and clarity to what the forum aimed to be and to achieve (see the WSF Charter of Principles in Appendix A). WSFs have continued to grow in numbers and diversity. The last WSF was held in the Amazonian region in the city of Belem, Brazil, bringing together over 130,000 people and an estimated 20,000 Amazonian tribes people that spoke in defence of their native forests.

The WSF’s self articulation through the charter was part of the larger development of a WSF process (WSF(P)). The process aspect of the WSF can be understood as:

1) how the event process has globalised to various regions,

2) how the WSF methodology has evolved,

3) the emergence of hundreds of local / regional forums,

4) the WSF’s evolving systems of governance and decision-making,

5) how the WSF has converged with other actors and processes for local to global change, and finally,

6) the processes by which social forums facilitate relationships and collaborations between a myriad of diverse actors.

The WSF(P) is thus where popular empowerment, and the popular project(s) for global social change were investigated. The WSF(P) has embodied a grassroots-to-global response to emerging challenges faced by communities around the world. It is where people at the receiving end of global problems, or those advocating for the marginal or voiceless, have gathered and voiced their concerns, articulated alternative visions, and formulated strategies to achieve these visions. It has been a platform for communities, organisations, and social movements to come together to form shared agendas for change. It is where I have researched and studied the processes of peoples and communities empowering themselves and exercising their agency in addressing the planetary challenges they (and we) face."