Fifty thousand people surged through the streets of Porto Alegre in Brazil, making music, shouting slogans, laughing, arguing, banging saucepans, and waving banners - loosely allied by a shared concern that there must be better ways of doing things.

Just over the border, the Argentinian economy was in a state of collapse. But there was optimism in facing the challenge of a debt crisis, where the wealthy countries are subsidised by the debt-servicing repayments of the poorest. The World Bank’s structural readjustment programmes involve the same poor countries in cutting the very education programmes which offer them the hope of learning their way back to financial health. And there is an international trade in street children’s organs.

I was reminded of the energies of the Anti-Nazi League rallies at the end of the Seventies in Britain; of the ferment of history workshop conferences; the easy communality of rock festivals; the theatre of carnival.

The scale of the task - in creating viable alternatives to a world where the largest companies operate in a global market substantially unmediated by global civil society - is immense. But so, too, was the agenda of the 800 workshops, 150 large seminars and 50 conferences that constituted the forum.

A young people’s forum attracted 10,000 participants; the World Parliamentary Forum and the World Congress of local authorities worked in different ways from the global alliance of indigenous peoples. Noam Chomsky drew an audience of 4.500 - late bookings for the forum were accommodated up to 80 miles away and bussed in daily.

Despite the scale and the cornucopia of choices available, it was surprising how many people wove similar journeys through the week’s programme. Surprising, too, that such effective planning could be sustained by the loose coalition of interests that constitute the forum.

As with the Greater London Council in the Eighties, we benefited from the support of local government agencies committed to popular democracy. Porto Alegre and the regional government of Rio Grande de Sul engage annually in popular budget-making processes, involving hundreds of thousands of people in deciding priorities for local government investments. Support for the forum grew from that.

Unsurprisingly, the forum attracted less press attention than the World Economic Forum taking place at the same time in New York. Southern Brazil is a long way from the centres of the global media. English took its place as just one of the languages of communication; and there was no single closing communique drafted in advance by a leadership. No formal organisation, no formal leadership, and no single mechanism for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the occasion.

There were few participants from Britain or other northern European countries, yet thousands from France, Italy and Spain. Doubtless a similar event in Africa would have seen more people from Britain - given our old colonial ties. Yet the forum exposed gaps in our public debate and lifelong learning agenda that I do not think we can lightly ignore. How best to forge an informed sense of our mutual dependence with the peoples of the south? What kind of global democracy can we create to counterbalance the emergence of a global economy? How can the voice and energies of young people contribute to revitalising democratic forms? In short, what is the place and form for political education for us now?

Paul Belanger, the distinguished Canadian adult educator, argued passionately that the only route to “another possible world” was through the engagement of the creativity, imagination, and learning of all the peoples of the world.

But all means everybody - a global version of the challenge facing lifelong learning here, and one no easier to confront.

The forum was the largest adult learning event I have participated in - but there was little paperwork; there were open and permissive arrangements for participation. No one inspected - but there were lots of people to get advice from. I might find it hard to elaborate precise learning outcomes from my trip - except for the hard-learned lesson that it is a mistake to leave your trousers on the beach in Rio - yet everyone I spoke to was inspired by the richness of the experience and the challenge of the agenda.

The third forum meets in the same place next year. It will be a good place to sharpen energies and to remake the world.

Alan Tuckett is director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education