The rule about Davos is that nothing is agreed there. It is not a negotiation, it signs no treaties, and no government is bound by anything said on its stages. Anybody who tells you a deal was done at Davos is describing a deal that was done elsewhere and announced in the snow.
The exception is from 1988. Greece and Turkey had come close to fighting over the Aegean the previous spring, and in January their two prime ministers met at the annual meeting and left with a declaration, a direct line between them and a set of working committees. It is the one occasion the Forum’s defenders reach for, they reach for it every year, and thirty eight years later they are still reaching for the same one.
The 56th annual meeting finished today. If you have spent the week seeing the word Davos without knowing quite what is being described, this is the whole thing from the beginning.
What it is
The World Economic Forum is a private foundation based in Geneva. It is not part of the United Nations, it is not an agency of any government, and it has no authority over anyone. Its annual meeting is a conference, held since 1971 in a small Swiss ski town chosen originally because it was cheap and out of the way, which it has not been for a long time.
This is the part that trips people up, because the guest list looks governmental. Roughly 2,500 people attended this year: heads of state and government, chief executives, central bankers, union leaders, academics, people running large charities, and a fair number of journalists. Put that many decision makers in one valley and the output starts to look like policy even though the venue has no power to make any.
Who is in the room, and what it costs to be
Attendance is by invitation, and for companies the invitation follows the money. Corporate membership runs in tiers, reported at somewhere around CHF 60,000 a year at the associate end and CHF 600,000 or more for the strategic partnerships at the top, with the industry tier in between. The tier determines how many people you may bring and which rooms they may enter.
Then, separately, the badges. A full access delegate pass has historically been quoted in the range of CHF 20,000 to 30,000 per person, charged on top of the membership that entitles you to buy it. Hotel and logistics in a full ski town in January are their own line and are not modest.
Two things follow from that structure. The first is that the business half of the room has bought its way in, which is the basis of most of the criticism and is straightforwardly true. The second is that the other half has not: heads of state, ministers, union officials, academics and cultural figures are invited and do not pay. The Forum’s income comes from the companies, and the companies are paying in large part for proximity to the people who came free.
What actually happens there
There are two conferences running in the same buildings.
The visible one is the public program: panels, speeches, launches, the interviews conducted on a platform in a tent. Almost all of it is streamed and archived by the Forum itself, so anybody can watch any of it without paying anything, and almost nobody does. This is the conference that produces the quotations.
The other one is a schedule of private bilateral meetings, held in hotel suites and hired rooms along the Promenade, between people who would otherwise need three months of diplomacy to get into the same building. A trade minister sees eleven chief executives in a day. An energy company sees four governments before dinner. Nothing is signed, but the conversation that precedes the signing happens, and it happens compressed into four days because everybody is already there.
That compression is the actual product. Davos is a scheduling device sold at a very high margin, and understanding it that way explains both why executives keep paying and why the public program so often sounds like nothing in particular. The panels are not the point. They are the pretext that gets everyone into the valley.
This year
The theme was A Spirit of Dialogue, chosen in October, and it landed in a week when the United States and several of its allies were publicly at odds over Greenland and over tariffs. Themes are chosen months ahead and are usually overtaken; this one was overtaken in a direction that made it read as either apt or plaintive depending on your temperament.
Mark Carney, Ursula von der Leyen and Donald Trump all spoke. The event most likely to be remembered was on Thursday, when the American president used the Forum as the venue to launch a Board of Peace for Gaza, with a signing ceremony and a membership list drawn largely from the Middle East and South America, under the second phase of the twenty point plan.
Note what that is and is not. A body was announced at Davos. It was not created by Davos, it does not answer to the Forum, and the Forum’s contribution was a stage, a camera position and the fact that the relevant people were already in town. Which is, precisely, the product described above, working as advertised.
The case against
The serious objection is not the hypocrisy one about private jets, though that is real and the Forum has never satisfactorily answered it. The serious objection is about accountability. A room of people with enormous influence, selected partly by who could pay, discussing the direction of economies in sessions that are not minuted, is a form of governance without any of the machinery that makes governance answerable. No one in that room was elected to be in it.
The Forum’s answer is that it convenes rather than decides, and that convening cannot be undemocratic because nothing binding comes out. That answer is technically correct and slightly beside the point, since the complaint is about influence rather than authority, and influence is exactly what the membership fee buys.
What to watch for next January
The question for the 57th meeting is whether the thing still works when the participants have stopped agreeing on the premises.
Davos was built for an era in which broadly everyone in the room shared a view of open trade and cooperative institutions, and disagreed about implementation. A week in which the headline disputes were between allies, over territory and tariffs, is a harder environment for a convening body, because a scheduling device only has value if the meetings it schedules are ones people want.
The measure will be attendance, and specifically the government half of it, since that is the half the companies are paying to be near. If heads of government keep coming, the Forum’s central claim survives another year. If they start sending deputies, the CHF 600,000 gets harder to justify to a board, and the thing unwinds from the paying end first.
