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The 2024 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is nearly upon us. Or rather, it is nearly upon the charming Alpine ski village of Davos, Switzerland, which every year turns itself over to thousands of well-heeled members of the global citizenry to discuss all kinds of problems they will then be pilloried for not doing more to solve.
It is a testament to both the human spirit and the allure of rubbing shoulders with a who’s who in the world of business that CEOs, government leaders, academics, and a small roster of A-list celebrities keep gathering here, a three-hour (and wonderfully scenic!) train ride, or a short helicopter ride if you’re so inclined, from Zurich.
Davos has served as host city for the WEF annual meeting ever since German economist, engineer, and business professor Klaus Schwab organized his first event there, known then as the European Management Forum, in 1971. (An exception was in 2002, when the WEF held its annual meeting in New York City in a show of solidarity after 9/11.)
This year, Davos will draw roughly 1,600 business leaders (including 800 CEOs, with JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Occidental Petroleum’s Vicki Hollub among them); 60 heads of state and government (including France’s Emmanuel Macron, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Vietnamese prime minister Phạm Minh Chính); 150 notable disruptors across industries, and 200 social entrepreneurs and young leaders involved in various WEF programs. The official theme of the 2024 gathering: Rebuilding Trust.
A powerful convener
For all the criticism it attracts as a gathering of the power elite, Davos (not the city per se, but the conference, as it is widely known) has been an early proponent of important ideas like stakeholder capitalism—it formally began pushing the concept in 1973, more than four decades before The Business Roundtable acknowledged that companies are responsible to more than just their shareholders. The forum has been equally early to put sustainability and the consequences of modern technology, the latter of which Schwab has dubbed “the fourth industrial revolution,” high on its agenda.
The WEF has been less effective in holding business leaders accountable for their failures to align their actions with the words they say on Davos’s stages. For example, at the January 2020 meeting, the CEOs of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo appeared on a panel about reducing plastic waste in oceans and acknowledged the need to better address the problem—and then both companies proceeded to increase their use of plastic packaging by hundreds of millions of pounds apiece.
But the WEF remains an unparalleled global convener of powerful people. And these people don’t mind lacing up snow boots—and using the famous WEF-provided crampons when the unplowed streets and sidewalks are especially slippery—and going through airport-style security checkpoints multiple times a day to race from panels at the elegant Congress Centre to cocktail receptions at the iconic Grandhotel Belvédère and other quaint spots around town. But most importantly, they seem to be more aware than ever that tackling solutions to the world’s biggest problems isn’t as intractable a challenge as coordinating ideas and responses on a global scale. That’s the observation of Peter Varnum, who used to work for the WEF leading global mental health projects and now serves as secretariat of the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative, a public-private partnership launched at the WEF’s 2021 annual meeting.
Davos “is not a conference that is traditionally focused on health,” Varnum says, “but it is a conference that is focused on power. So those folks who have power and who are interested in a topic like brain health can be in the same place, and we can be the ones to convene them to have the conversation.”
What’s on the 2024 Davos agenda?
Trade, climate change, and artificial intelligence all figure prominently on the agenda, which includes more than 200 sessions that will be livestreamed from the WEF’s website.
Count on the crowds and programming to be just as busy away from the official conference grounds, at hotels and converted storefronts up and down the Promenade winding through town. From the SDG Tent with programming tied to the UN’s sustainable development goals, to a Bill Gates appearance at the pop-up Microsoft Cafe, to three full days of panels at the Equality Lounge, there’s a lot to choose from each day. But much of the programming, like the WEF itself, is by invitation only or requires advance registration.
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