World Social Forum - a retrospect

Ten years ago I attended a World Social Forum for the first time. I led  a Canadian delegation of about 12 people to the first World Social Forum held outside Brazil.  In addition to participating in the Forum itself, I attended a preparatory meeting of the International Council, the body that oversees the direction of the Social Forum movement; I also attended an evaluation meeting of the Forum in India following the event. Our delegation participated in an international gathering on the right to water, which was held in New Delhi during the week before the World Social Forum in Mumbai. At that meeting activists from all over the world gathered, including Vandana Shiva, Ricardo Petrella, Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke as well as representatives of more local struggles in Vanuatu,  Bangladesh and union representatives from the New Delhi water works struggling to avoid a diversion of the Ganges River system.

After the experience of the Forum in India, I was also invited by the World Forum on Theology and Liberation to attend the World Social Forum held in Senegal where we tried to engage Muslims in a dialogue about common foundations of our religious traditions.

Years have passed since those events. Water has been generally recognized as a basic human right; some work has been done to advance inter-religious dialogue with the Muslim world though the general situation preoccupies many of us.  

For some reasons, my entries on the World Social Forum have continued to be accessed almost every day. Perhaps this is a reflection of the enormous network the WSF movement has created.

The World Social Movement has led to new vitality among social movements throughout the world – unprecedented in human history. The social media have opened up extraordinary new avenues of communication and coordination across the world on a very wide variety of issues that have common underlying foundations that we continue to explore.

I offer this update just to say thank you to all who come to visit here and to encourage you to continue in your search for that better world that is possible.