Every January the world’s cameras turn, for a week, on Davos, a village in Switzerland which for the rest of the year is merely a decent, if expensive, decent Alpine ski resort. The images that dominate the television news channels are predictable: snow, private jets, expensive badges, billionaires in puffer jackets. Its critics roll their eyes and point to the environmental cost of all those private jets and helicopters. Its defenders speak earnestly of ‘stakeholder capitalism’.
The World Economic Forum‘s 56th Annual Meeting is taking place this week amidst almost unique geopolitical circumstances, given US President Donald Trump’s threats to take, by hook or by crook, Greenland. Trump, scheduled to attend, would do well to heed this year’s theme, ‘A Spirit of Dialogue’.
It is unlikely that anything—leave alone the Greenland issue—will be settled in Davos. But that’s not the point of Davos: it’s not a forum you can judge by outputs. You have to judge it by alignment effects.
What it’s not
Indeed, Davos is not, and never has been, a decision-making body. Nothing gets voted on. It’s not a conspiracy either—the guest list is public and sessions are streamed online (the innovation of a former WEF media manager, who wanted, and succeeded, to bring the Forum closer to the wider world).
Not that everything happens in public. Says one insider, “The real unit of activity at Davos isn’t the panel discussion. It’s the breakout room”.
Public sessions serve primarily as signalling devices. When a chief executive appears on a panel about ‘Harnessing AI for Good’, they’re advertising their firm’s priorities and values to peers, regulators and investors. The panel itself rarely produces new thinking. What matters is who approaches them afterwards.
The hierarchy runs like this: public panels (for visibility), invitation-only roundtables (for preliminary positioning), closed bilateral meetings (for actual negotiation), and off-programme encounters in piano bars and ski chalets (where the terms get finalised). Proximity is everything. A breakfast with the right minister beats a keynote address.
Davos assembles distinct groups with different aims, and these groups often hail from a much more diverse background than is generally thought.
CEOs attend for competitive intelligence—they’re talking laterally to rivals and suppliers, mapping the terrain. Governments court capital, pitching investment opportunities to rooms full of asset managers. Tech firms legitimise themselves politically, demonstrating that they’re ‘responsible innovators’ rather than threats.
Non-governmental organisations trade moral authority for access, hoping that their presence in the room translates into board-level commitments back home. Media outlets act as both mirror and megaphone, reflecting proceedings whilst shaping which narratives gain traction.
The asymmetry matters. Some attend to shape narratives. Others attend to avoid being shaped by them.
Stabilising ideas
Why do the annual themes matter if nothing binding emerges? Because Davos doesn’t invent ideas—it stabilises them.
As concepts, stakeholder capitalism, resilience, and AI governance recur not because the Forum pushes ideology but because it provides coordination infrastructure. Once an idea becomes ‘Davos-safe’, it becomes boardroom-safe six months later. The Global Cooperation Barometer, launched this year, won’t force countries to cooperate. But it gives finance ministers a shared vocabulary and data set to reference when they do.
This is narrative engineering, not persuasion. Davos runs on alignment, not argument.
So why do companies pay membership fees ranging from 60,000 to 600,000 Swiss Francs to attend? They’re not buying tickets. They’re buying relevance.
Attention is scarce. Davos concentrates it. A week in Switzerland compresses what might otherwise require months of separate meetings across three continents. Chief executives purchase face time with regulators who control market access. Countries purchase visibility—India’s state governments pitch investment opportunities, while African finance ministers seek development partnerships. Davos functions as a reputational clearing house, where being present signals that you matter.
Davos rewards presentability, not necessarily progress. Looking committed to sustainability whilst arriving by private jet is evidently not disqualifying.
Why it persists
Every year, the criticism usually writes itself: elitist, hypocritical (those jets emitted roughly 9,700 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to 350,000 cars in a week), detached from ordinary concerns. Oxfam’s inequality report, released to coincide with Davos 2024, noted that the world’s five richest men doubled their fortunes since 2020 whilst five billion people became poorer.
All fair points. So why does Davos persist?
Because global coordination has nowhere else to go. The G7 makes decisions but includes only seven countries. The UN has legitimacy but struggles with execution. Davos occupies a different space: pre-decisional convergence. It’s where finance ministers quietly sound out central bankers before formal policy announcements. Where pharmaceutical executives gauge regulatory appetite for new frameworks. Where climate negotiators test messaging ahead of COP summits.
Informal alignment is sometimes the only alignment available. When multilateral institutions weaken, something has to fill the gap.
What it can’t fix
Davos, like any forum, has structural blind spots. It over-represents incumbents and under-represents anger, scarcity and failure. The poor optics are real—symbolism does matter when you’re claiming to address inequality from a luxury resort. There’s an optimism bias baked into the format: people fly to Switzerland to talk about opportunities, not admit defeat.
American political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the term ‘Davos Man’ to describe an elite class with no national loyalty. The critique holds. These are people fluent in the language of “sustainable transformation” who genuinely believe they’re fixing the world, even as their own travel choices undermine their climate pledges. Davos understands systems better than it understands the streets.
Sadly, power increasingly operates through networks, not hierarchies. All Davos does is reflect this. It’s narrative-driven before it’s command-driven. It’s informal before it becomes institutional. Davos isn’t the cause of these shifts—it’s a symptom. Understanding that symptom explains more about how modern governance actually works than any organisational chart.
The World Economic Forum doesn’t run the world. But it does rehearse the arguments of those who try.
Photo: Dreamstime.
