MANILA, Philippines - For the longest time, the World Bank had been the favorite whipping boy of Filipino activists and nationalists. From the Marcos dictatorship to this day, hardly a street demonstration goes by without the bank being excoriated for its “structural adjustment programs” in which the bank grants millions of dollars in loans to the Philippine government but with huge strings attached. These are conditionalities that, for better or worse, have shaped the country and affected our lives in profound ways.
High prices of oil? This may be traced directly, say critics, to the economic deregulation programs that the World Bank and its twin, the International Monetary Fund, have imposed on the Philippines in exchange for loans.
High prices of onion and other food stuff? This is the result of the liberalization policy, again imposed by the World Bank and other multilateral aid agencies, to open up the economy to foreign competition.
But in recent years, the World Bank has come to a realization that, as Nigel Roberts, the director and co-author of the World Development Report 2011 conceded in a recent interview, the old ways of doing things are over.
One realization that will potentially change the way the World Bank works from here on - and, because of its cachet and influence in the international community, probably other aid agencies as well - is that the phenomenon of political and criminal conflict and violence around the world needs to be taken into account in whatever development program the bank and the others will help put in place in countries around the world.
The World Bank’s key mission, as outlined in the report and as Roberts explained in the interview, is to help “[strengthen] legitimate institutions and governance to provide citizen security, justice and jobs.” This, it said, “is crucial to break [the] cycles of violence” that have crippled nations across the globe, such as the Philippines, which is battling a communist insurgency and an Islamic separatist movement that are some of the longest-running in the world.
“Violent conflict has exacted a heavy social and economic cost on the Philippines, with over 120,000 people killed over the last three decades,” said Roberts , who was on a two-day visit to the Philippines this week. “While serious conflict occurs only in parts of the country, it affects the Philippines’ international image and, thus, is a national problem.”
The following are excerpts from an interview this week between Roberts, InterAksyon.com and journalist Inday Espina-Varona of ABS-CBN:
Question: Please summarize the report.
Roberts: This is the first time that the World Bank has written a World Development Report on this topic. The reason for this is that this is an extremely important subject from a developmental perspective. About upwards of 1.5 billion people today live in countries that are severely affected by conflict, and that is a conservative estimate. By conflict, I mean both political violence and criminal violence. It’s not really useful to make an absolute distinction between those two forms of violence because what we see today is that they are increasingly intertwined with each other.
This is a dominant phenomenon of violence in the post-Cold War era… For example in Central America, you saw the civil wars of the ‘80s and the ‘90s ended with successful peace treaties but now you see those countries overwhelmed with criminal violence. In Nepal today, you see a situation where there has been a comprehensive peace agreement settling the conflict between the state and the Maoist rebels but you now see a vacuum in legitimacy of the state and widespread criminality increasing. Often today also, you’ll see that political and rebel movements are financed by the proceeds of trafficking and other forms of illegal gangs. So the boundaries between these different forms of violence are shifting.
So not only is this a problem that affects 20 plus percent of the world’s population – it’s also an extremely destructive phenomenon. Quite apart from the loss of lives and all the personal sufferings that is involved in areas of conflict, the economic and social costs are enormous. So your average country that undergoes a protracted civil war will lose, on average, 30 years of GDP growth. Think about that. That’s a pretty enormous cost.
At the same time, those wars are associated with major degradations of human rights. We use a human scale which goes from 0 to 8, and the average country that undergoes a major civil war will suffer a loss of 3.8 points on that scale.
These wars also cost enormous displacement of people and social costs best summed up by the fact that no country that is considered fragile under the World Bank’s characterization or is in conflict today has achieved a single Millennium Development Goals nor is likely to do so by 2015. That illustrates as much as anything else the growing of difference between the group of countries or areas of countries that are locked in this repetitive cycles of violence and the rest of the world which is more or less stable.
Now in our report, we obviously wanted to understand why violence occurs. And in simple terms, it arises from a combination of various forms of stresses both from within and outside societies in combination with weak and illegitimate institutions. So that’s the sort of equation we work with. Stresses and stress factors exist in any societies at all times. They themselves are not enough to trigger outbreaks of massive organized violence. It’s the absence of efficient and legitimate institutions that is in a sense the real problem.
One thing we found, and I think this is important, when we look across the literature about the causes or the stresses that provoke violence, the dominant phenomenon that we found in terms of internal stresses generated from inside societies is what we will call injustice, exclusion, perceptions of grievance, and, in the broadest sense of the word, unfairness. Now, that obviously has major policy implications for national government as well as for the international community.
Having said all that, the main purpose of writing a document like the World Development Report is to do something about the problem, not simply to describe it. We are after all not a pure research outfit. We’re an operational institution that attempts to try and deal with this problem.
But when we look at the literature, both academic and policy literature, we found there was very little that would tell us how countries have managed to exit if you like from these repetitive cycles of violence. So we really had to go to the source to actually get this information and that is the heart of the inquiry of the World Development Report. In this sense, it’s unusual. We went to the developing world to actually learn how to get out of violence. We went to those countries that have managed this transition.
What we try to do is to say, okay, here are countries that have made a reasonably credible transition away from far more severe violence to much greater stability over a period of one or two generations. What did they do right? What was it they did that other countries that remain locked in violence like Nepal or Haiti did not manage to do? Now the answers to that, of course, is found in the World Development Report and I say this not facetiously but because the report is intended as a workbook -- for societies, for government, for development agencies that are grappling with this problem.
So there are many examples and many answers to the questions that are laid out in some detail. It’s important to stress because the WDR does not give you one answer on how to deal with violence. It doesn’t give you one answer because there is no one answer.
When it came to looking at the kind of assistance we provide to national processes, we found that there is a lot wrong with the way things are done today. The international community works in separate silos. It tends to react slowly. It tends to remain engage in too short a period of time. And it tends to actually in many ways misunderstand the nature of the problem. We tended to talk about post-conflict reconstruction as if that was the single and the only challenge facing societies, whereas what I laid out for you and explain is in fact the continuous process of conflict prevention or conflict management. It’s not a one-shot deal after which societies snap back to normal. It’s nothing like that. It’s an extended gruelling, messy process of intervention in which imperfect tools and political compromises have to be made every single day.
You mentioned that the WDR is a workbook. Does this signify in practical terms a shift by the World Bank in how it engages the developing world in terms of managing their conflicts?
I’d like to think it does. First of all, the repository of global knowledge on how to deal with conflicts in our view lies in those societies and with those practitioners who’ve actually managed these transitions.
There’s a significant acknowledgment by the bank that the source of wisdom in this case lies in the society and in the societies and the practitioners who’ve undergone those transitions. Our job is much more as a convenor of that knowledge. Try to put it together. Try to put a strong analytical cast to the story and try to disseminate that story widely.
One of the policy implications of that is that those societies who undergo these transitions or are not undergoing these transitions and who want to try and understand how they can do better should actually go to other societies, to their peers in other parts of the world and ask them how did you actually build a successful coalition when you have such a contentious society around the time that this peace accord took place. What did you do to convince the population that you were for real? That this time this government was actually serious? How did you cross that credibility gap? What did you do to actually lock in these commitments? How did you make these processes more transparent? How did you deal with corruption without completely destabilizing the new coalition?
So again the idea of a workbook is something new. The idea is not that the report will somehow freeze the knowledge in a moment of time, not like that. What I would like to see in a year’s time is for people to look at the report and say, “Okay, that was pretty good a year ago but we know far more than that now. We’ve gone way beyond. That was good but it’s out of date. It’s last year’s novelty.” That’s what I would like to see.
How do we navigate toward being pragmatic in one sense and without neglecting the legitimate aspirations of people who are caught in a conflict?
A lot of the report is very fine-grained, nitty-gritty practical examples. So we don’t simply say you need to deal with injustice or perceptions of injustice. Of course we need to do that. We know that. I think it’s important to stress the importance of that factor. But then we go on and give numerous examples of the kinds of programs that do and don’t work in terms of practically addressing that issue. So, for example, one aspect of dealing with injustice is to have a functioning justice system where justice is made available to petitioners. We know for example from Afghanistan that one of the key selling points the Taliban has had in the past is that they provide justice whereas the government does not. It may be the kind of justice that you or I would not particularly wish to be exposed to, but nonetheless it’s a lot better than nothing as far as the local inhabitants are concerned. So here, we give examples of how you can actually put in place legal process that are rapid, that function, that are accountable.
Is there a lesson that Mindanao can learn from the World Development Report? What are the key points that we should watch out for?
We did do a particular case study of four subnational conflicts and that includes Mindanao as well as Aceh, Northern Ireland and the Basque region in Spain. We also looked across a variety of conflicts since the end of World War 2. There are roughly 50 that are associated with regional autonomy or secession demands. There are some common points that emerged. First of all, almost all of these conflicts run for a very long period of time. Second, most of them have as a key characteristic a notion of a separate regional or local identify and the perception that this is either not recognized or some sense compromised and oppressed by the central state. I said perception because it is varies in terms of the realities of that.
Very commonly, the response tends to be a combination of a security response and some kind of economic development. Very commonly, those are not perceived by local communities as adequate response because they do not tend to acknowledge what I would call the injustice element or the perception of injustice related to identity. Commonly again, when resolution is achieved, it involves a greater degree of decentralization than the central state imagined it would have engaged itself in at the beginning of the conflict. Again, I’m being rather general here because that points you in some sense to the common or the most common solution, which is some effort by the central state to show that it has recognized and credibly addressed the sources of injustice and the perceptions of misunderstood identity. What that would mean in different conflicts varies enormously but there has been a tendency, quit often, to overlook or to discount or even to marginalize that kind of demand and to try to substitute these security and economic elements for this more holistic approach that has to include in some form this “justice element.”
[We also found that] the actual implementation of this decentralization process is enormously complicated and has many, many pitfalls associated with it. Those pitfalls include arguments about resources that are located within the territory and how they are going to be shared between the government and the region. They include the danger of empowering a new elite in those areas, perhaps no more representative than the national dispensation prior to that. They include the need quite often to protect new minorities that emerged from the process of decentralization and devolution. They include managing the complexity of a process that is multidimensional and multidisciplinary which does inevitably involve very close coordination between security, between justice and economic agencies, which is really difficult under any circumstances anywhere.
A decentralization process or a devolution process is not something to jump into with your hands over your eyes and your fingers on your nose. It’s a very complicated process that really has to be thought through with care.
It seems this report took a long time coming. We’ve been hobbled by all these conflicts for decades and people have been identifying the sources of the discontent and all the other internal stress factors and now here comes this report. Of course the difference is that it’s the World Bank talking, it’s the World Bank basically putting its money where its mouth is.
Certainly this is of increasing priority for the World Bank. Whereas the report is really not about what the World Bank should do, it does have clear implications for the bank.
We also talk of the need for us to take a very hard look at our skills and our staffing. We would like to be a center of global expertise on conflict. We are not at this point such a center of global expertise. We have a number of people who have a very good strong experience of working in conflict-affected areas but much of the global expertise in this lies outside the bank, much of it lies with practitioners, it resides in think tanks in emerging countries and in networks that are different from the networks of the World Bank.
In my own view, we need to think about a very different approach to creating staffing expertise, one based much more on networking than on simple direct recruitment. That is a major shift for this organization, the notion that you can’t simply have everybody in-house and they will give you everything you need. It’s a notion that we are part of a networked world that is far more sophisticated, far more educated and far more experienced in dealing with these complex policy matters than was the case a generation ago. And it’s for us to adjust to that reality.
The bank is taking this agenda very seriously and I’m pleasantly surprised I might say to see the extent it is doing so because I was not certain writing this report that that would in fact be the bank’s reaction.
What is the report’s implication on such World Bank programs as structural adjustment? How does this work with that?
The old era of structural adjustments is essentially over. When we think of the classic structural adjustment errors that were made in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we think of programs that were imposed, we think of unreasonable reform requirement, we think of template solutions that were lifted out of other contexts and inappropriately put into conflicts where they would not work. I think the WB underwent some pretty hard learning in the ‘90s and in the last decade as a result of the evident failure of many of these programs. And we learn some things that are now, of course, fairly obvious. First of all, that you cannot impose reforms of any kinds on societies that don’t want to reform or of a nature that is inappropriate for that society. » READ MORE
