What did, didn’t happen as Davos forum again scrapped

In recent years, questioning the ongoing existence of the World Economic Forum’s annual confab in Davos, Switzerland, became almost as much of a ritual as the event itself.

Each January, mainstream media outlets would publish headlines like “Does Davos still matter?” “Is the World Economic Forum in Davos still relevant?” and “Does the world need Davos?” even as those publications sent their correspondents to the Alps.

Now, the naysayers have a chance to test their thesis. For the second year in a row, the annual in-person meeting in Davos was scrapped because of the coronavirus pandemic. An in-person gathering was announced for late May, but the relatively last-minute change makes it easier to assess what has until recently been a hypothetical debate: Would it matter if Davos just went away?

In the immediate term, the answer seems to be: not all that much.

Davos’ defenders over the years have argued that the conference, with so much global media in attendance, is a singular place to advance the conversation about how to improve the state of the world. This is where the stakeholder capitalism movement — which urges companies to look beyond the bottom line — gained traction, where globalization found its most ardent champions and where grandiose documents like the “Davos Manifesto,” which calls on companies to be more responsible, debuted.

Yet even without the usual media breakfasts and cocktail receptions, many of the newsmaking events that are traditionally timed to coincide with Davos still happened this year. Edelman, a public relations firm, still released its Trust Barometer. (Spoiler alert: The public doesn’t trust anyone these days.) BlackRock CEO Larry Fink still released his annual letter. (Stakeholder capitalism still matters, he says, but so do profits!) And the World Economic Forum itself decided to forge ahead with an abbreviated virtual program featuring a collection of heads of state and executives.

Others have held up Davos as one of the few places where governments, companies and nonprofits come together to address climate change and global health issues. The World Economic Forum hosts the Tropical Forest Alliance, a collaborative effort to prevent deforestation. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, was created at the forum’s meeting in 2000 and has been instrumental in bringing vaccines to poor countries. And in 2020, the World Economic Forum announced an initiative aimed at restoring and growing 1 trillion trees by 2030.

What didn’t happen this month was the actual coming together of 10,000 or more movers and shakers in the Alps for a week of networking, bluster, idea swapping, skiing, parties and schmoozing. What looks like superfluous socializing, said Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff, can be a productive exercise.

“You can say it’s a conference of the elites, that nothing gets done, that it’s just a bunch of parties,” Benioff said. But “there just aren’t that many places where business leaders and government and religious and cultural and nonprofits and media all get together and have a true multistakeholder dialogue.”

It is that mix of leadership, big money and big ambition, idealism and capitalism, that makes Davos Davos, and which, depending on whom you ask, is either the problem with the whole affair or the very point of it.

At the very least, it’s the part that has proved hardest to replicate via Zoom.

CLARA TUMA/THE NEW YORK TIMES A pedestrian makes his way along a mostly deserted area Jan. 9 in Davos, Switzerland. Davos ditched its annual economic forum again.