The World Economic Forum and COVID-19

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is arguably the most important informal international organisation today. Every year, politicians, businesspeople, journalists, and academics flood to the otherwise quiet city of Davos to attend the Forum’s Annual Meeting. Nevertheless, the WEF is much more than a conference organiser, and its conscious effort to influence world politics has been visible for decades now. To the extent that the WEF’s role in contemporary world politics has been theorised at all, this is through the prism of neoliberalism. The neoliberal interpretation may help one grasp the WEF’s politics during the 1990s, but it by no means does justice to the ideas and proposals that it has been putting forward since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book substitutes the mainstream neoliberal interpretation for a corporatist one. It demonstrates that, far from being a vehicle for neoliberal advancement, the Forum should be seen and evaluated from the vantage point of shifting dynamics of corporatism. Having its origins in the post-war tripartite system of negotiation and compromise between employees, employers, and the state in Northern and Western Europe, the Forum’s corporatism nowadays assumes global forms. These forms do not signify changes only in the geographical scope and breadth of the Forum’s corporatism, but also in its very nature and fundamental characteristics. To the extent that the main stakeholders today are the people and planet, corporatism ceases to reflect special interests and becomes one of our best bets for a better future.

The book’s intended audience includes students of international organisations and world politics, international political economists, as well as global health theorists.