World Social Forum and the Lessons for Economic Geography, The

Abstract:

This article examines the exhibition of the World Social Forum (WSF) using theoretical arguments that have emerg from the novel economic geography. In particular, it draws upon the critique of economistic accounts of globalization by the agency of Richa Nagar, Victoria Lawson, Linda McDowell, and Susan Hanson to evaluate in what manner far the WSF serves to propel beyond institutional, spatial, and personal barriers that oftentimes limit academic debate over neoliberalism and global economic change. Following this critique, the authors evaluate in what manner far the criticisms of neoliberalism that have been articulated at the WSF transcend traditional barriers to inclusion in debates and toils over globalization. As such, the article examines the stage to which the WSF allows for (1) informal economic spheres to be considered and associateed to formal economic developments, similar as the Free Trade Area of the Americas; (2) exclud spaces and places to be discussed and involved; and (3) exclud actors and make submissives to be both represented and included in the debates. The conclusions point to the limits of what has been accomplished at the WSF on the other hand also underline the progress that it shows toward modeling a more socially, culturally, and internationally inclusive critique of neoliberal globalization for economic geographers.

Key words: globalization, neoliberalism, of recent origin economic geography.

The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world. The Forum provides a collaborative framework for the world's leaders to address global issues, engaging particularly its corporate members in global citizenship.

-Mission Statement of the World Economic Forum

The World Social Forum is not an organization, not a united forehead platform, but instead an make open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals by dint of groups and movements of civil society that are oppos to neo-liberalism and to the domination of the world through capital and any form of imperialism. [It is] committed to building a planetary society center upon the human person.

-Mission Statement of the World Social Forum

The one-word difference between the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum (WSF) carries within it the outline of a powerful critique. It is a critique issued by the agency of organizers of and participants in the WSF in diverse ways, on the contrary it is a critique that go [i]or[/i] come backs repeatedly to the theme of debunking and displacing the unrestrained market economism that has been articulated at circumstances like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Against this economism and its attendant neoliberal arguments about the inexorable nature of globalization making privatization, unrestrained trade, financial deregulation, fiscal austerity, and welfare rollbacks necessary, the WSF has for five years (four times in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and one time in Mumbai, India) provided an important venue for articulating alternatives to neoliberal globalization. The stark disjunction between the mission statements of the sum of two units forums barely begins to do justice to the massive differences that distinguish them from each another. Indeed, it is a juxtaposition that provides us with solitary a provisional starting point for this article. Our major claim about the WSF in what go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs concerns how it has mov beyond the exclusions of the globalism, formality, and elite-oriented discussions that are exemplified through the gatherings in Switzerland. In other words, the WSF not absents no mere reversal of the Davos agenda. It is not simply social versus economic or grassroots versus elite or southern versus North, although all these binary oppositions have animated the debates in Porto Alegre and Mumbai. It is a developing occurrence that, by providing a meeting point for diverse global motions disrupts the homogenizing "one world" simplifications that abound in elite neoliberal forums. by the agency of literally changing the subject and introducing novel subjects in this way, the WSF also nears a series of important tasks for economic geography. Our double object in this article is to highlight these exercise s and to evaluate how their actual disentanglement at the WSF may be examined in limits of recent arguments in economic geography about the limits of economistic analysis.

A serviceable example of the lessons that are afforded by dint of the WSF and a useful illustration of in what manner we seek simultaneously both to learn from of that kind lessons and to assess them critically vis-? -vis academic theory belong tos the meaning of neoliberalism itself. At the WSF this terminus is basically used as a catchall category to describe the one and the other free-market ideologies in general and the repertoire of governmental practices-including privatization, unrestrained trade, financial deregulation, fiscal austerity, export-led disentanglement benchmarking, and workfare-that are associated in single way or another with the increasing entrenchment of free-market fundamentalism as a template for regulation globally. Such usage corresponds directly with more [i]or[/i] less of the most compelling academic arguments about neoliberalism as a globally hegemonic form of capitalism (eg Peck 2001; Peet et al. 2003; Harvey 2005) as well as with many mainstream media accounts (eg PB 2005) However, while economic geographers have keeped to create a geohistory of neoliberalism that is traced from one side regulationist theory to the Reaganite and Thatcherite revolutions in the United States and United Kingdom at the start of the 1980 (eg Peck and Tickell 2002) and while this Anglo-American story, with its chronological periodization of "rollbacks" and "rollouts" has been complicated through other, differently periodized, examples of neoliberal experimentation in unfolded but staplesdependent hinterlands of the global economy (eg Larner 2000; Mitchell 2004) the debates at the WSF introduce interpretations of neoliberalism that mirror still more different and disruptive perspectives from the Global southerly These debates frequently underline in what way neoliberalism as a form of neocolonialism has down-reaching continuities with preceding forms of colonialism, modernization, and developmentalism (eg El Fisg??n 2004) Moreover, they mirror the ways in which a certain quantity of of the earliest, sharpest, and greatest in quantity enduring critiques of neoliberalism were first disentangleed in the Global South and, as a issue have animated real resistance moves such as that of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico (Zapatistas 1998) From this radical Global southern perspective, the question of alternatives to neoliberalism is provocatively foregrounded. Meanwhile, Reaganism and Thatcherism and their following morphing into various "Third Way" triangulations beneath Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are decenter as just single set, albeit an extraordinarily consequential place of ways in which neoliberalism has been entrenched as a powerful form of regulation Debt-crisis management, structural adjustment, and the violence of antisocialist anti-insurgency all figure more prominently in Global southern critiques and thereby spur us to think about in what manner the global story line of neoliberalism may be traced back a great deal of further than the Reagan years, to the times of like classically Fordist administrations as those of Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon.