Organized Movement or Moving Organization – the Case of the World Social Forum

Since the 1990s there has been a significant growth in the number of Non-Governmental-Organizations (NGO) operating on a transnational level. This was called ‘NGO-Boom’ and was largely considered as a positive sign towards an emerging global civil society (Keck und Sikkink 1998). Some of these ‘new’ transnational civil society actors organized themselves to influence the politics of international institutions and to challenge multinationals. Doing ‘lobbying’ requires an effective and efficient way of organization to compete with transnational companies. The organizational forms of these actors are often comparable to those of private business companies (Mintzberg und Westley 2000). Other civil society actors deny any form of hierarchical organization and experiment with horizontal ways of organizing themselves. One example is the World Social Forum (WSF) with its ‘open space’ concept (Whitaker 2007). In 2001 a transnational coalition of civil society actors organized the first WSF event. The last WSF took place in Tunis (Tunisia) in spring 2013. In this paper I will present some insights of an in-depth ethnographical research on the organizational forms of the WSF. I will present the major mechanism and structures which help to stick together the transnational coalition who organizes the WSF since 2001. By doing so, I will discuss the possibilities and limits of the WSF between organized movement and moving organization.

Keck, Margaret E.; Sikkink, Kathryn (1998): Activists beyond borders. Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca [etc.]: Cornell University Press.

Mintzberg, H.; Westley, F. (2000): Sustaining the Institutional Environment. In: Organization Studies 21 (1), S. 71–94.

Whitaker, Chico (2007): Das Weltsozialforum. offener Raum für eine andere Welt. Hamburg: VSA-Verlag.