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DEVELOPMENT: NGOs Welcome At AsDB Meeting

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MADRID, May 3 2008 (IPS) - An Indonesian woman in her early fifties flew into this city to share a tale about "Three people and a goat". Her audience were heavyweights from the Asian Development Bank (AsDB), the Manila-based financial institution holding its 41st annual governors’ meeting in the Spanish capital from May 3 to 6.

It was a rare moment for Titi Soentoro. She succeeded in getting the ear of Haruhiko Kuroda, president of Asia’s premier lender for development. Soentoro, a campaigner for the Jakarta-based environmental and gender lobby Nadi, told Kuroda about the social and environmental cost of a project in Indonesia that the AsDB approved to fund last year.

The local proponents of this project – the reconstruction of a cement factory in Indonesia’s northern province of Aceh – had painted a false picture of the area near the factory to secure the loan of 45 million dollars, according to Nadi. Among the misleading claims was one about the absence of people close to the site. There were only "three people and a goat" in the vicinity, they said, giving the impression of an isolated terrain.

But that is far from the case, Soentoro argued during her encounter with Kuroda at the Institucion Ferial de Madrid (IFEMA) Convention Centre, where the meeting was being held. She backed her narrative with pictures of the estimated 200 families who have been affected by the clouds of dust from the factory and images of a nearby ecosystem under threat, where a river flows from caves.

In response, Kuroda said: "I will take note of your concerns. I will ask my staff to be aware of the problems you raised."

Soentoro’s ability to draw the attention of the bank’s chief was not an isolated incident on the first morning of this conference. There were other activists from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from as far a field as central Asia, south Asia and south-east Asia who were offered time during two sessions to ‘turn the heat on’ the bank’s officials. If not Kuroda, the NGO activists had other senior staffers to openly probe, such as the bank’s auditor general and the secretary of its compliance review panel.

Consequently, activists challenged the bank’s embrace of greater private sector involvement to reduce poverty in Asia, the bank’s push to lower the bar of social and environmental safeguards when granting loans, and its attempts to tackle corruption within the bank and with companies it works with on development projects. Red flags were also raised by NGOs worried about displacement of people due to two hydropower projects in Nepal and Laos that the bank is backing, and child labour used in a bank-funded agriculture programme in central Asia.

"These are useful sessions for us. It enables us to hear the voices of opinion makers from civil society and to explain the bank’s thinking behind issues of concern," C.R. Rajendran, secretary of AsDB’s compliance review panel, said in an interview. "These sessions are about accountability."

Yet there is more that such encounters reveal at this annual event – which this year has attracted close to 3,000 government leaders, captains of finance and industry, academics and activists to discuss ways of reducing poverty in Asia. Currently, the region accounts for 600 million of the world’s absolute poor, living on less than one dollar a day, and 1.5 billion living on less than two dollars a day.

The meetings mark a growing confidence by the financial institution to openly engage with some of its trenchant critics, even within a conference meant to showcase the good work the AsDB claims to have achieved since its creation four decades ago.

"This is now becoming a regular fixture, where we are given the space to raise critical issues to get some answers and, in some cases, follow-up action later," says Hemantha Withanage, executive director of the NGO Forum on the AsDB, a long-time critic of the bank. "Compared to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank is much more open."

Yet, this was not the case in the early 1990s. "When civil society groups tried to engage with the bank in 1991-92, bank officials were very hostile to NGOs. They were not willing to talk or listen. They said that NGOs had no role in shaping the bank’s policies," Withanage explained in an interview.

The bank’s shift from such a frosty relationship to a warmer one with NGOs is reflected in an upward spiral of activists who have increasingly attended the annual meeting to get their message heard. From only 16 NGO activists who came for the 1992 meeting in Hong Kong, the number increased to 42 activists at the New Zealand meeting in 1995, 103 at the 1999 meeting in the Philippines and to the highest yet 192 at last year’s meeting in Japan.

"The interaction between the ADB and NGOs have become mainstream. My colleagues deal directly with NGOs now," Bart Edes, head of the NGO and Civil Society Centre at the bank, told IPS. "The NGO presence at our meetings has exploded in the last three years. We also have labour unions attending."

Edes admits that the relationship has been "challenging," but through the dialogue "critical NGOs have made us aware of things we didn’t know. They have influenced the way we operate."

Soentoro, hopes this will be the case with her cause in Aceh. "This was my first meeting with Kuroda. He now knows something is wrong with the project," she told IPS. "He has made a commitment."