A clip of a World Economic Forum panelist has gone viral after she expressed concern that people across the West are losing trust in “the elite.”
The comments were made at the World Economic Forum’s Great Narrative Conference in Dubai in November 2021.
Panelist Ngaire Woods, Professor of Global Economic Governance at Oxford University, said that one potential obstacle to governments’ Covid restrictions and climate measures in the coming years was that “the majority of people trust their elites less.”
“At Davos a few years ago [surveys] showed us that the good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more,” she said.
“So we can come together and design and do beautiful things together.
“The bad news is that in every single country they were polling, the majority of people trusted their elite less. So we can lead but if people aren’t following we aren’t going to get to where we want to go.”
She continued:
“Tonight more European countries are going into lockdown just when they thought they had this pandemic nailed. Because guess what? You can’t nail it without addressing it across the whole world. So we’ve got this incredible opportunity while we’ve got people’s attention to reset.
“I think the big opportunity is to do a reset. A really fundamental reset.”
The event’s theme featured the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab discussing “designing a great narrative” for the future, with speakers highlighting trends of “digitalisation,” “green energy transitions,” “engineering DNA” and more.