Switzerland - When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gained the spotlight and made headlines around the world by stating, loud and clear, that the 2026 Davos Forum is not only taking place in the face of a change in the world order, but above all in the face of a profound rupture of the current order, his speech transcended Swiss borders and resonated intensely among markets, governments, heads of state, and even on social media in the most diverse regions of the planet.
Davos takes place at a time when the World Economic Forum is no longer just a space for coordinating and defining the foundations of the global economy, but is now explicitly reflecting the fractures in the international order. The current atmosphere of the meeting is marked by power rhetoric, tariff threats, and territorial discourse, in contrast to the historical narrative of cooperation, predictability, and respect for organizations such as the UN, WTO, WHO, and the sovereignty of territories and nations.
In this context, the governance of the Davos Economic Forum is under scrutiny, as it should be a reaction to a world in which unilateral decisions are replacing multilateral rules. Governance emerges in the debate as a minimum common language in an increasingly fragmented international system.
The tariff threats discussed in Davos illustrate a relevant shift: tariffs are ceasing to be a technical instrument and are beginning to operate as a political tool. When tariffs become a mechanism of geopolitical pressure, international trade ceases to be predictable and begins to incorporate strategic risk.
The insistence on the theme of governance refers to a historical lesson: the international trade system was created to prevent the return of protectionism that fueled instability and the two great world wars. Protectionist measures extend beyond the economic field, also acting as catalysts for international political destabilization.
Attributes that the Davos Economic Forum has always sought to preserve, using its numerous spaces for debate to contain polarization and, based on international law, to address issues that went beyond the direct scope of the forum's own activities.
The postwar economic order sought precisely to contain this risk by replacing the logic of power with the logic of rules and by prioritizing the strengthening of organizations capable of mediating and balancing influence between major powers, medium-sized actors, and emerging forces.
The theory of comparative advantage, the basis of the World Trade Organization, presupposes predictability and institutional confidence to function; however, what we observe today, and which appears recurrently in Davos, is the erosion of these conditions without a new stable international order having been built.
The practical weakening of multilateral institutions is perceived in Davos as a symptom of a larger problem: the difficulty of containing the unilateral exercise of power. International law continues to exist, but its deterrent capacity is limited when major powers choose to test its limits.
Thus, governance appears less as a normative ideal and more as an attempt to prevent the current transition from resulting in disorder. The normalization of discourses about strategic territories shows that the rules remain valid, but their application has become selective. In this context, global governance risks being reduced to a mechanism for managing economic volatility, without addressing the underlying asymmetries.
For countries like Brazil, the debate in Davos is relevant because the weakening of governance increases exposure to external shocks and reduces the protection offered by multilateral rules. The ongoing transition is pressuring middle economies to operate increasingly through bilateral agreements and strategic alignments. The insistence on the issue of governance prevents a paradigm shift from becoming normalized.
The debate in Davos today goes beyond economic growth or investment; we are witnessing the definition of the next phase of the global economy, that is, whether it will be governed by institutional principles (by norms) or by force, and without governance, the transition tends to bring less international economic order and favor power politics.
We cannot stand idly by while yet another powerful organization, historically a defender of multilateralism, is dismantled—as happened with the WTO in 2025, in the wake of the massive tariffs implemented by the United States, which even went so far as to relativize economic considerations in order to impose itself on the rest of the world.
But the echoes of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech on January 21 offer encouragement and show that the governance and political presence of the Davos Forum continue to function as a normative ideal – as well as expressing an explicit effort to prevent what Carney described as a rupture from turning into disorder and the erosion of yet another institution.
Ligia Maura Costa is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Council on Good Governance and a tenured professor at FGV-EAESP.
