Davos, or a Ranking of Our Own Blunders

For twenty-one years, the World Economic Forum has been publishing its Global Risks Report. Its ability to generate vast amounts of attention and remarkably little action never ceases to amaze me. We sit as a passive audience to a thriller in which, in truth, we should be the main characters. These risks are not exogenous forces. All thirty-three listed risks are created by humans and ultimately inflicted upon humans.

The concerns that mattered five years ago still matter today. And if at some point they stop doing so, it will not be because they were resolved, but because they were displaced by something more urgent. Extreme weather events start to feel almost secondary when a war looms on the horizon. The risk ranking does not describe the state of the world; it reveals our inability to tackle problems that are systemic and global in nature. The report could just as easily be titled “A Ranking of Humanity’s Greatest Blunders.”

The list contains thirty-three risks, yet the underlying causes are far fewer.

The concentration of power in the hands of those who lack both the capacity and the moral authority to wield it; an obsolete economic system built on indicators that measure precisely what should not be measured; an education system designed to reproduce social inequality; a generalized state of submission—and the deliberate production of enough distractions to ensure collective lethargy in the face of all of the above.

Global, systemic problems require global, systemic responses. But for those who choose to look for them in the Sustainable Development Goals, the task becomes harder, not easier. While the SDGs are an excellent tool for raising public awareness, their structural weaknesses prevent them from pointing toward any real solution.

1. They carry no regulatory or binding force—like almost everything produced by the United Nations. Debating seventeen colorful logos is a very different exercise from failing to prevent violations of national sovereignty, threats to global peace, or the systematic infringement of the most basic human rights. And those, in theory, are—or should be—the organization’s raison d’être.

2. No one will lose an election or be removed from office for failing to meet the SDGs by 2030 (because they will not be met, though I sincerely hope this proves to be one of many statements in which I am wrong). Accountability is entirely absent.

3. Causes, consequences, and intermediate phenomena are conflated. It is never clear which specific lever must be pulled to initiate meaningful social transformation.

4. Above all, the goals themselves are internally contradictory. In a world where we have yet to fully decouple economic growth from resource consumption, emissions, and waste generation, objectives such as 8 and 7, or 12 and 13, are mutually exclusive. We lack both the economic theory required to resolve this dilemma and the global will to develop it.

 

Despite the collective schizophrenia implied in allowing “the comms people”  to draft a self-congratulatory text while the Secretary-General pens a critical one, both presented together as the official introduction to the Annual Progress Rerport, the reality is that this is little more than a façade. A poor attempt to obscure the simple truth that we remain far from the stated goals.

Ironically, the root causes behind the risks identified in Davos and the failure of the SDG framework may well be the same.

I may be wrong in my diagnosis. But this is precisely what we should be debating. Because once we agree on the causes, the solutions will be that much closer.

By Alberto Muelas

Partner, Foresight and Impact