The History of Davos Side Events

The first sign that Davos could do something an official summit couldn't came in 1986, when Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal and Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou — leaders of two countries that had come close to war over the Aegean and Cyprus — met informally on the sidelines. Two years later they came back, and with Schwab personally shuttling between Athens and Ankara in the run-up, signed what's remembered as the Davos Declaration: a joint commitment to normalize relations. Özal later told Schwab that without that first Davos meeting, war would have been unavoidable. The underlying disputes — Cyprus, minority rights, the military balance in the Aegean — were never fully resolved, and the goodwill didn't hold. But historians still mark 1988 as the moment Davos proved it could produce something a formal negotiating table couldn't.

The clearest example came in 1992. Nelson Mandela, released from prison two years earlier, appeared on a Davos stage alongside South African President F.W. de Klerk and Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi — their first joint public appearance outside South Africa, at a genuinely fragile point in the country's transition. Mandela used the moment to give his first speech on what the ANC's economic policy would actually look like in power, and later told journalist Anthony Sampson that conversations with other leaders at Davos that week changed his thinking on nationalizing the mining industry outright. A year later, Mandela and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize. None of this was on an official agenda in the way a keynote is — it happened because the room was full of the right people at the right moment, which is exactly the logic the entire side-event ecosystem would later be built on.

Through the 1990s, Davos increasingly became shorthand for something bigger than the Forum itself — a week where global economic conversations converged on one small Alpine town, whether or not those conversations were happening inside the Congress Centre. The idea for what became the G20 is traced to talks at Davos in 1998, years before it took formal shape as an institution. By 2004, the phenomenon had its own name: political scientist Samuel Huntington coined "Davos Man" in a Foreign Policy essay, describing a transnational elite — executives, academics, international civil servants — who had more in common with each other than with their own countries. Huntington was writing about a type of person, not a type of event. But naming the type was itself a sign that Davos had stopped being just a conference and started being a place people organized their year around.

That's the backdrop the Houses era grew out of: a town that filled up every January with more people than the Congress Centre could ever hold a badge for, most of whom still wanted somewhere to be seen, host a meeting or run their own programming — badge or no badge.

What changed in the 2010s wasn't the Forum's own agenda — it was everything around it. For one week each January, ordinary Promenade storefronts started turning into something else entirely: coffee shops became corporate lounges, closed-for-winter boutiques became country pavilions, restaurants became invite-only dinner rooms. Companies with no official role in the Annual Meeting — Google, Facebook, Salesforce, HSBC among them — began renting whole buildings for the week and running their own programming inside them, independent of any WEF badge or agenda. A House, once it existed, needed no accreditation to speak at, host at, or walk into — just an invitation from whoever was running it that year.

By the time this was fully normal, the record of who was seen with whom had become genuinely newsworthy in its own right. In January 2019, a photo of Apple's Tim Cook and Microsoft's Satya Nadella at the same dinner table as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — alongside Swiss President Ueli Maurer, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and members of the Belgian royal family — circulated widely after CNBC reported on it, precisely because it captured something the official programme never could: who actually ends up at the same table, off the record, once the sessions end for the day.

The most striking recent proof of how fast a Promenade venue's meaning can flip came in May 2022. The building known as Russia House had hosted the Russian delegation for three straight years running. After Russia invaded Ukraine, it wasn't invited to that year's Annual Meeting at all — and within months, Ukrainian philanthropist Victor Pinchuk had funded the same storefront's conversion into Russia's War Crimes House, a photo exhibition documenting alleged war crimes using data from Ukrainian law enforcement and Amnesty International, timed deliberately to open during Davos week. CNBC and The Art Newspaper both covered it as one of the most talked-about things in town that year — not because the WEF programmed it, but because nothing stopped anyone else from renting the room next door and making a statement of their own.

That's still how it works. Houses, country pavilions and AI-branded activations now share the Promenade with embassies, media broadcast studios and private dinners, all running on their own budgets and their own guest lists, for the same week, independent of the official agenda and of each other. Davos's own municipality has recently started capping how many of these activations can exist in a given year — a real constraint on new venues, not on the side-event culture itself, which has nowhere close to run out of room to grow within it.

None of this runs on one schedule. A speaker at a House breakfast panel on Monday might be on a completely unrelated dinner's guest list Tuesday night, booked through a different host, with no shared organiser and no reason the two would ever coordinate. Some sessions need an RSVP weeks out; others are a wristband handed out once and good for the rest of the week; a few are genuinely open, walk-in-off-the-street events with no list at all. The venues range from a converted shopfront with a stage built for the week to a hotel suite with eight chairs around a table. What they share is that none of it is run by the Forum, none of it needs a WEF badge, and none of it is written down anywhere in one place — which is still, more than fifty years into this, the actual logistics problem of attending or speaking at Davos.