1) The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a world order centered on the human person.
2) The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre - held from January 25th - 30th, 2001, was an event localized in time and place. With the Porto Alegre Proclamation that “another world is possible”, it becomes a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the events supporting it.
3) The World Social Forum is a world process. All the meetings that are held as part of this process have an international dimension.
4) The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of capitalist globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations’ interests. They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world history. This will respect universal human rights, and those of all citizens - men and women - of all nations and the environment and will rest on democratic international systems and institutions at the service of social justice, equality and the sovereignty of peoples.
5) The World Social Forum brings together and interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world, but intends neither to be a body representing world civil society nor to exclude from the debates it promotes those in positions of political responsibility, mandated by their peoples, who decide to enter into the commitments resulting from those debates.
6) The meetings of the World Social Forum do not deliberate on behalf of the World Social Forum as a body. No one, therefore, will be authorized, on behalf of any of the editions of the Forum, to express positions claiming to be those of all its participants. The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions as a body, whether by vote or acclamation, on declarations or proposals for action that would commit all, or the majority, of them and that propose to be taken as establishing positions of the Forum as a body.
7) Nonetheless, organizations or groups of organizations that participate in the Forum’s meetings must be assured the right, during such meetings, to deliberate on declarations or actions they may decide on, whether singly or in coordination with other participants. The World Social Forum undertakes to circulate such decisions widely by the means at its disposal, without directing, creating hierarchies, censuring or restricting them, but as deliberations of the organizations or groups of organizations that made the decisions.
8) The World Social Forum is a plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party context that, in a decentralized fashion, interrelates organizations and movements engaged in concrete action at levels from the local to the international — to built another world. It thus does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the participants in its meetings, nor does it intend to constitute the only option for interrelation and action by the organizations and movements that participate in it.
9) The World Social Forum asserts democracy as the avenue for resolving society’s problems politically. As a meeting place, it is open to pluralism and to the diversity of activities and ways of engaging of the organizations and movements that decide to participate in it, as well as the diversity of genders, races, ethnicities and cultures.
10) The World Social Forum is opposed to all authoritarian and reductionist views of history and to the use of violence as a means of social control by the State. It upholds respect for Human Rights, for peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, races, genders and peoples, and condemns all forms of domination and all subjection of one person by another.
11) The meetings of the World Social Forum are always open to all those who wish to take part in them, except organizations that seek to take people’s lives as a method of political action and those organizations that exclude groups / communities based on ethnic, racial, religious or caste considerations from the democratic world.
12) The WSF process in Pakistan must necessarily make space for all struggling sections of society to come together and articulate their struggles and visions, individually and collectively, against the neo- liberal economic agenda of the world and national elite, which is breaking down the very fabric of the lives of ordinary people all over the world and marginalizing the majority of the world people, keeping profits as the main criteria of development rather than society and destroying the freedoms and rights of all women, men, and children to live in peace, security, and dignity.
13) The WSF process in Pakistan must also make space for workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, dalits, women, hawkers, minorities, immigrants, students, academicians, artisans, artists and other members of the creative world, professionals, the media, and for local businessmen and industrialists, as well as for parliamentarians, sympathetic bureaucrats and other concerned sections from within and outside the state. Most importantly, it must make space for all the ‘sections’ of society that remain less visible, marginalized, unrecognized, and oppressed.
14) In Pakistan all civil and political organizations/groups that are organizing around people’s issues — economic, political, social, and cultural — are being profoundly challenged by the religious and political intolerance that is raging in the country, and increasingly across the world. There is the threat of growing communal fascism and fundamentalism. The WSF will strive to encourage a process that allows all of those who are combating communal fascism and fundamentalism to come together, to hear and understand each other, to explore areas of common interest, and also our differences, and to learn from the experiences and struggles of people here and in other countries.
15) The WSF process in the region involves not only events but also different activities across the country. These processes, in the spirit of the WSF, would be open, inclusive and flexible and designed to build capabilities of local groups and movements. The process should also be designed to seek and draw out peoples’ perceptions regarding the impact of neo-liberal economic policies and imperialism on their daily lives. The language of dissent and resistance towards these will have to be informed by local idioms and forms.
16) WSF will strive as far as possible for self reliance based on local resources generation in its activities. However, recognizing that global solidarity, against the global neo-liberal agenda may involve international events. For such events and activities, resources may need to be mobilized from external resources.
17) As a forum for debate, the World Social Forum is a movement of ideas that prompts reflection, and the maximum possible transparent circulation of the results of that reflection, on the mechanisms and instruments of domination by capital, on means and actions to resist and overcome that domination, and on the alternatives that can be proposed to solve the problems of exclusion and inequality that the process of capitalist globalization currently prevalent is creating or aggravating, internationally and within countries.
18) As a framework for the exchange of experiences, the World Social Forum encourages understanding and mutual recognition among its participant organizations and movements, and places special value on all that society is building to centre economic activity and political action on meeting the needs of people and respecting nature.
19) As a context for interrelations, the World Social Forum seeks to strengthen and create new national and international links among organizations and movements of civil society, that - in both public and private life - will increase the capacity for social resistance to the process of dehumanization the world is undergoing and reinforce the humanizing measures being taken by the action of these movements and organizations.
20) The World Social Forum is a process that encourages its participant organizations and movements to situate their actions as issues of world citizenship, and to introduce onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices that they are experimenting in building a new world.