Conceptualising agency through the world social forum process: a layered analysis of alternative globalisation

Ulrick Beck's notion of sub-politics, in describing civil society's trans-national responses to the challenges of late industrial capitalism, embodies implicitly the power of civil society and the third sector to create desired social changes within a widening arc of risk horizons. Subsequent to Beck's 1999 writings, we have seen the emergence of the World Social Forum Process, which has become a platform for the global justice / alter-globalisation movement, and has worked as a catalyst in bringing together civil society / the community sector into new meta-networks, in order to address such meta-problems. A primary question explored in this paper is how communities address the large scale global challenges of neo-liberalism turn neo-conservatism, through a globalisation from below. This paper addresses this question through an examination of the World Social Forum Process as complex agent of social change, arguing that the World Social Forum is a platform for social innovation, which can be seen through a 'layered complexity' perspective. Causal Layered Analysis, and complex adaptive socio-ecological systems perspectives, offer layered frameworks that can be used to understand the World Social Forum Process as platform for social innovations. From this view Social Forums can be seen to be platforms for fast moving resistance, to deeper policy, law and institutional innovations, and on to even deeper worldview shifts, epistemological reconstructions (the epistemology of the Global South), and a culture of 'horizontalism', and through to the emergence of deep narratives for a Global Commons, people's power and building a planetary society, paralleled by new myths and metaphors. Using this approach, Beck's notion of sub-politics is expanded, as the construction of a cosmopolitan world order takes on a multi-causal and multi-temporal dynamic.