Latin American feminists played a very strong role from the very beginning of the WSF, in 2001, in trying to put women’s issues on the agenda. There are also a handful of very vocal feminists on the International Coordinating Committee of the WSF who have been pushing this from the beginning. In terms of effort at least, the effort has been there.

Despite this, I think that feminists from around the world who have been to the WSFs, including those who have been involved on the organizing side, have been really disappointed with the lack of a serious feminist analysis or presence at the WSFs. Last year at the closing press conference of the WSF Candido Grzybowski who was the spokesperson for the Brazil organizing committee actually made a point of saying that one piece of unfinished business of the WSF was taking feminist issues more seriously and addressing them more directly.

Latin American feminists have been pounding away with some gains each year, which laid the groundwork for the gains this year in India. Of course, the Indian feminists drew on their own strong movement, organizations, and history of feminist organizing as well. Feminists worked in tandem at the India and international decision-making levels. One example of the advances is one of the four mass events for 25,000 at the2004 WSF will address patriarchy and war. In addition, planners accepted the principle that all official panels should have gender parity.These are signs that gains are being made.

What we found over these few years is that, except for the brilliant efforts of Latin American Feminists, most groups have come to the WSF as individual organizations. This does not give us the same kind of impact. Early on people showed up to see what was happening and to figure out if it was an important place to be. In the second and third years many more women’s groups organized events and workshops. Anybody can put on a workshop. As all of our organizations hosted workshops, we tended to average only 15-20 people, many of whom we already knew. Meanwhile, there where plenaries going on with 4,000, 8,000, 10,000 people in other places that were not addressing a feminist agenda at all. One observation is that the proliferation of small workshops was driven by the need for funds to get to the WSF. In 2003 two feminist groups helped to plan the major plenaries, precisely to overcome this marginalization. However, because the events were physically distant, they had low participation.

So a decision was made this year by a handful of regional and international feminist networks, that it was important to start early and to build on the lessons learned. It was decided to reduce the number of small marginalized events while trying to coordinate across regions to have a few big events that put forth a more integrated feminist analysis into issues that are on the agenda. This also meant greater coordination of fundrais-ing, in a transparent way. While many other groups will sponsor separate workshops, this group of networks has succeeded in collaborating on two larger events, planned for 1000-4000 people.

The groups involved in this process are Articulacion Feminista Marcosur; DAWN; FEMNET in Africa; INFORM, which is the only local group and is based in Sri Lanka; ISIS International; The National Network of Autonomous Women’s Groups in India, which is our host; and WICEJ. These groups have been in dialogue with many other groups but these are the networks that have agreed to take responsibility for coordinating some of the presence at the WSF 2004. For WICEJ several member groups have been active, including WEDO, DAWN and the Center for Women’s Global Leadership. There are at least 50 women’s organizations that have been part of the conversation at some point, primarily electronically. As noted, this planning process has a three year history that we are building on. Some of this history is linked to relationships that people have had over many years and others are relationships that have increased over the last few social forums.

The real initiative in Latin America came from a mostly Southern Cone coalition called Articulacion Feminista Marcosur. They organized much a presence in the Porto Alegre social forums, with creative visibility in the major marches, and a women’s march in 2001. They also spearheaded the Campaign Against Fundamentalisms, which both AWID and WICEJ are part of. A lot of us have found it very inspiring. First, because they have great marketing sense, they know how to have an incredible presence in terms of media and visibility. Second, tt is an important campaign because it is seeking to address the dogma of a neoliberal economic agenda as well as what is happening around religious fundamentalism and how both those trends are restricting women’s human rights. We see it as a very powerful campaign for bridging differences in what have sometimes been different universes within global feminist organizing. It addresses issues around women’s rights to control their bodies and their lives as well as women’s economic and social rights. It has brought these two strands together.

Articulación Feminista Marcosur hosted a Women’s Strategy Meeting last year one day prior to the WSF, that WICEJ co-sponsored,. Its purpose was to strategize about that specific WSF. For many women from outside the region, it was their first introduction to the WSF as an organizing space. The outcome was an evaluation meeting at the end of the WSF, when we knew that the WSF was moving to India. We evaluated a lot of what had not worked about our strategy as well as the idea that a day before the event is not a good time to try to strategize for that particular event. The strategizing has to take place well in advance. That is what initiated this effort to create a dialogue among regional and global networks that could do planning over the whole year.

It has worked well because there are women on the International Coordinating Committee of the WSF as well as women on the Mumbai Organizing Committee who are part of this conversation and can keep us abreast of how things are evolving in terms of planning. It is in a sense a two-pronged agenda. One is to influence a feminist presence at the WSF and the other is to take advantage of our being there from all over the world to create a space for feminist conversation separate from the WSF.

Absolutely. New structures, mechanisms and styles have emerged for this Fourth World Social Forum because it is in a new place. A lot of us feel that this is a very positive thing. We love Porto Alegre and we would love to go back but it was really good to shift to a new region because it really does internationalize the WSF. It gave the planning process, the logistics, and local planning to a new set of players. That has brought its headaches, problems, and differences as well as the positive fact that a whole new region is getting involved and integrated into the WSF process in a more direct way. For us as feminists it meant building new relationships with new organizations and learning more about Indian feminism and the dynamics of the Indian left.

There have been several ways. The WSF has several different formats for debate. There are major events that are planned by the International Council. A Content Committee, in broad consultation, ultimately put together the themes and panellists for the key events. Very early on in the year there is an intense lobbying process that goes on vis-à-vis the people who will be at those meetings. This is to try to get themes and names on the agenda. Our feminist colleagues on the International Coordinating Council, who created a women’s caucus as part of that space, had a major role in this regard. It was the Indian women who played a very instrumental role in pushing for gender parity on all of the panels and events that the WSF sponsors.

Also, one of the four major events will be dedicated to "War against women, women against war". Planners set up a framework of four themes for the entire WSF, and one of them is on patriarchy, which is a major change from previous years. It is because of both the incredible work over three years that the Latin American feminists have done and the intense lobbying that Indian feminists have taken up.

Separate from that, anyone can organize major panels and make the case for self-sponsored panels that get chosen by the WSF. Among many events planned, Indian feminists are doing a major event on globalization and a major event on religious fundamentalisms. Our regional and international network is collectively doing a session within the framework of the Campaign Against Fundamentalisms called "Political bodies: new emancipatory struggles to promote a radical democracy".

Another one, that the National Network of Autonomous Groups of India is organizing in collaboration with other networks is an inter-sectoral dialogue. We found that one of the weaknesses of the WSF is that while it is suppose to be a big tent to bring together a lot of different social movements, everybody tends to talk to people within their own track, unionists talk with unionists, rural workers talk with rural workers, feminists talk with feminists, and development groups talk with development groups. There hasn’t been a lot of dialogue about how to build an integrated social movement that can have a greater impact and how are we moving beyond our own niches. One of the goals that we set was to encourage more dialogue across sectors. We will be helping to host a dialogue that brings together four groups: identity based groups working around racial justice; unions; feminists; and gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender. We will explore how groups join in the broader social movements for social change while keeping the issues on their own agendas and bringing those into the larger struggles.

These are some of the things that have emerged. There is a feeling that women’s voices have been very loud and strong in the planning of this WSF. They have been able to get an enormous amount of what they have called for. Feminists have figured out how to get into the planning.

There are two different efforts. The first is a small pre-event, Building Solidarity: a Feminist Dialogue. Unfortunately, this is closed, with very limited numbers, due to space constraints and the goal of regional balance. It is an effort to bring a small group of women together to say "can we listen to each other better and go deeper on some of the sticky points in global feminist organizing?" These issues include: North-South dynamics; different prioritization around issues like reproductive rights or violence or economic justice issues; work at the local or global levels and the choice of venues for our work; issues of sexual identities and rigid definitions of sexuality; an assessment of using a human rights perspective; issues of co-optation; people’s understandings of religious fundamentalisms and how people engage with religion -whether they seek to reinterpret it in feminist ways and gain space within a religious tradition or whether they seek to challenge religious traditions outright. We seek to explore how neoliberalism, fundamentalisms, neoconserv-atism. communalism and militarism are linked at the current juncture, what that means for women’s rights, and how we

get more strategic about our organizing. While this can’t all happen in two days, the process leading up to it, and conversations it sets in motion are perhaps the most valuable part of the experience.

There are a lot of different kinds of strategies emerging from people’s particular lived experience and realities. This dialogue is an effort to have some conversations across regions and issues that begin to surface these diverse perspectives. One of the longer terms goal, besides working more effectively together, is how can we go into larger social movement arenas like the WSF with a more coherent feminist voice.