By Luke Baker
ROME (Reuters) - In a bid to offset criticism of globalisation, the world's first "Glocalisation" conference has opened in Rome, backed by the World Bank seeking to give the global economy relevance to ordinary people.
Mayors of dozens of cities around the world gathered on Saturday with development experts and World Bank President James Wolfesohn for the three-day meeting which officially establishes the "Glocal Forum", a body that will be at once global and local.
"When we talk of globalisation, our thoughts go to the gap, the divide between the powerful and the weak," Glocal Forum's president Uri Savir said in an opening address.
"All too many people are excluded, all too many lives are marginalised and invisible," he said. It was up to officials such as mayors to help make the world a more inclusive place from the local level -- the city -- upwards, he added.
Rome's mayor, Walter Veltroni, described the Glocal Forum as a "network of cities and institutions which together believe they can build a new type of governance on a global scale".
"It is in the world's cities, where more than 50 percent of the population lives, where the challenges of the future lie where we must play a role," he told fellow mayors from as far afield as Paris, Boston, Washington, Dar es Salaam, Hanoi and Athens.
Wolfesohn, often the target of anti-globalisation campaigners for what they see as the bank's heavy-handed imposition of development solutions, described glocalisation as a brilliant concept whose time had arrived. <http://www2.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&eid=1144160>
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