In recent years, an ever-expanding ecosystem of multi-stakeholder groups has spread across all sectors of the global governance system. The multi-stakeholder model is already being built. Harris Gleckman describes this as a move to turn the UN into a public-private partnership, creating a special place for corporations inside the UN. Perhaps the most symbolic example of this shift is the controversial strategic partnership agreement the United Nations (UN) signed with the WEF in 2019. In practice, corporations become the main stakeholders, while governments take a backseat role, and civil society is mainly window dressing. Instead of corporations serving many stakeholders, in the multi-stakeholder model of global governance, corporations are promoted to being official stakeholders in global decision-making, while governments are relegated to being one of many stakeholders. WEF partners include some of the biggest companies in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna). Who are these other, non-governmental stakeholders? The WEF, best known for its annual meeting of high-net-worth individuals in Davos, Switzerland, describes itself as an international organization for public-private cooperation.

The way the WEF sees stakeholder capitalism being carried out is through a range of ‘multi-stakeholder partnerships’ bringing together the private sector, governments and civil society across all areas of global governance. The idea is that global capitalism should be transformed so that corporations no longer focus solely on serving shareholders but become custodians of society by creating value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and other ‘stakeholders’. The magic words are ‘ stakeholder capitalism’, a concept that WEF chairman Klaus Schwab has been hammering for decades and which occupies pride of place in the WEF’s Great Reset plan from June 2020. And it involves things as fundamental as our food, our data and our vaccines. In fact, more sinister because it’s real and it’s happening now. While these may be absent from the WEF's Great Reset initiative, what I found was something almost as sinister hiding in plain sight. At the heart of conspiracy theories are supposed secret agendas and malicious intent. Intrigued by the palaver around last year’s summit, I decided to find out what the WEF’s Great Reset plan was really about. The set of conspiracy theories around the Great Reset are nebulous and hard to pin down, but piecing them together gives us something like this: the Great Reset is the global elite’s plan to instate a communist world order by abolishing private property while using COVID-19 to solve overpopulation and enslaving what remains of humanity with vaccines. According to the BBC, the term ‘Great Reset’ has received more than eight million interactions on Facebook and has been shared almost two million times on Twitter since the WEF initiative was launched. The theories were triggered by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) summit last year, which had the theme ‘The Great Reset’ and argued that the COVID crisis was an opportunity to address the burning issues facing the world. ‘The Great Reset’ conspiracy theories don’t seem to want to die.

The great reset agenda 2030