The ‘Trust and Integrity in the Global Economy’ (TIGE) conference, the last of six conferences at the Initiatives of Change centre in Caux, above Montreux, closed on Tuesday, the 17th of August.

This last of the six weeks of the conferences in Caux has brought together business professionals, social entrepreneurs, representatives of NGOs and people from the food industry, from every continent, to develop actions directed at creating a fairer economy.

The conference season started on 2 July, with a conference on ‘Learning to Live in a Multicultural World: Fundamental rights and multiculturalism in Europe’. It was followed by the third Caux Forum for Human Security ‘for peace-builders at all levels, and from varied sectors, around the world’. Then it continued with ‘Everybody Counts - A dialogue across generations and cultures’ with a large participation from Scandinavia. It was followed by two concurrent conferences on ‘Leading Change for a Sustainable World’ and Training by Initiatives of Change, Courses in peace education, teambuilding, dialogue...

At the closing session, a professional coach saluted the great variety of generations, nations, backgrounds and experiences represented. ‘I love this culture and this atmosphere,’ she said. An African woman banker noted the ‘fantastic combination of spirit and structure here’. The development bank where she worked operates on ‘a very political basis, using hard-core mainstream techniques’. ‘A more personal spirit needs to get into our lending processes,’ she suggested. They worked with governments rather than the direct beneficiaries of, for example, a sanitation project. ‘We don’t see the faces of the people. I saw here that there are faces behind the numbers.’ Another participant noted that ordinary working life means being ‘Surrounded by a lot of talk, a lot of egos. This is the first time in the last 9 months that I’ve had one and half minutes of silence with a group of people.’ An African-English trainer asked, ‘Are we going to dance to the tunes out there, or look inside ourselves and get a guidance inside to change the “out there”?’

Neue Zürcher Zeitung carried a major interview with R Gopalakrishnan, the Executive Director, Tata Sons and a Member of the Group Executive Board, Tata Group, one of the keynote speakers at the conference. One of the organizers noted that Maria Voce, the Italian leader of the Focolari spiritual movement and this Indian business leader had spoken to the conference on successive days, but they had both spoken the same language. Another of the organizers insisted on the importance to trying to deal with ‘Root causes, otherwise it’s just a band-aid. We must work on the values that create trust and integrity’. It was ‘not so much a conference, but a process’; the economic system in the global economy is based on continual growth but nothing in nature grows for ever, said a Swedish business consultant. An East European fighter against corruption said, ‘We need more minds to find new ways to make the economy work.’

A Muslim participant expressed thanks for the respect and help that the Muslims in the conference had experienced in their observation of the fasting month of Ramadan.

A ‘Food and sustainability network’ was born in 2009, and is now part of the TIGE conference (see: http://www.iofc.org/sites/all/files/FSN%20Mission%20september%202009.pdf). In this year’s conference, there was a ‘work stream’ on ‘Food, Consumer Responsibility and a Sustainable Economy’ led by Lavinia Sommaruga Bodeo, responsible for Policy Development, at Alliance Sud, a Swiss network of development organisations, and Cristina Bignardi, an organic farmer from Italy, who is also Secretary of Pace Adesso. Further actions and conferences are planned for the coming year – and another TIGE conference in planned for 2011.

The organising team of this year's 'Trust and Integrity in the Global Economy' conference