ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two of the major meetings of the World Economic Forum in 2005: the Davos Annual Meeting at the end of January and the India Economic Summit in New Delhi at the end of November. Although the two events were of different orders of importance in terms of the Forum’s annual agenda, the narrative of each event contributes crucial elements to an understanding of the Forum’s most public activities. Davos remains the signature conference of the Forum each year, attracting the highest level and most illustrious list of attendees, whilst New Delhi was one of several annual regional summits. However, the two meetings are similar in terms of structure and format. Taken together they span the year in the public life of the Forum. The India Economic Summit is arguably the most important of the Forum’s regional meetings, given the Forum’s historical relationship with India and the CII (see Chapter 1). Also, as the last event before the 2006 Davos meeting, the Delhi meeting was perceived as of particular importance in 2005 in light of the Forum’s increasing concentration upon India’s “growth and democracy” model and China’s growing role in the global political economy. The two narratives with accompanying analysis seek to bring greater depth of understanding of the core of the Forum: the interaction between members and between members and guests at Forum events. Two different narrative approaches are taken in order to give different perspectives on Forum meetings. The 2005 Annual Meeting at Davos is reviewed from several external perspectives, including a collation of the public record of the highlights of the meeting, an account of the Forum’s narrative of the meeting and a review of how the media covered the meeting. By contrast, the narrative of the India Economic Summit is told experientially from the perspective of the author as an
invited guest. The narrative recounts experiences of panels and other meeting sessions, as well as social occasions and the individuals who attended. Both narratives seek to convey the importance of the Forum’s construction of the visual, aesthetic and experiential quality of Forum events for participants. Neither narrative approach can claim to be comprehensive, but taken together they contribute to building a composite, layered understanding of the personalities and interactions that make Forum meetings the knowledge-generating and information-exchanging events that they are.
