Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, January 3, 2010
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group

WASHINGTON — The World Bank is becoming more pro-city. The strategy seems a major departure for an institution that long leaned toward rural areas, many of its governing officials and affiliated governments subscribing to the view that aid to the countryside would somehow stem the massive tide of people moving to cities in search of jobs and opportunity.

The new policy, officially announced by World Bank president Robert Zoellick at a November meeting in Singapore, boldly defines urbanization as the 21st century’s defining phenomenon. Manage the growth of developing world cities well, he said, and the challenges of climate change, jobs, poverty reduction and health can be dealt with proactively, and more effectively.

There’s lots to like in the new approach. It acknowledges that cities, with their pools of talent and capital, are the linchpins of global economic growth. But it also aims to help them grow more compactly, reducing the per-household cost of housing and infrastructure even while triggering fewer carbon emissions than today’s typically sprawling patterns. Included is the bank’s new EcoCities Program, which provides cities with a baseline diagnosis and options to both retrofit and expand in an environmentally sustainable way.

And there’s social consciousness here too, with an explicit goal to “put the poor on the map” with scaled-up efforts to tame the deep poverty that afflicts so many world cities, most vividly in the low-income, least urbanized cities in Africa and Asia. Technology is hailed as one important new tool: geographic information systems that can map not just where the poor live, but also show if cities are providing them basic rights of land tenure and such essentials as fresh water, sanitation, and electric power.

At least in words, one sees the bank making common cause with the growing civil society in the world’s cities–business, socially concerned non-government organizations, universities and citizen groups. For an organization that’s historically worked most with national governments on dams, roads and water systems, it sounds like quite a new departure.

But it’s not quite as new as it sounds. Since 1999, the bank has hosted the Cities Alliance, a multinational effort to identify effective new strategies to combat urban poverty. Even in the 1970s under its then-president, Robert McNamara, the bank’s goals included facing the world’s urban challenges. An extensive strategy for cities was developed by urban-oriented staffers in the bank and published 10 years ago. But the new iteration is most explicit and practical yet, with guidelines for making cities key in the bank’s field operations and lending programs to developing world governments.

And we’re seeing decentralized government flowering around the world. Nations’ capital city bureaucracies, which long monopolized power–often as a legacy of the era of western colonial control–have increasingly found they can’t provide the services demanded in diverse local communities. Very powerful non-government agency and community-led systems of service delivery are emerging– “in spite of and because of central government” –notes Junaid Kamal Ahmad, the bank’s sector manager for urban and water issues in its South Asia operations.

In fact, the decentralization phase, which began in Latin America 30-some years ago, now impacts more than 100 nations across the globe. “With more than half their GDP coming from cities,” says Abha Joshi-Ghani, the bank’s manager of urban development, “the economic future of most developing countries will be determined by the productivity of these burgeoning urban populations.”

The real issue, Ahmad insists, is local democracy: “Will cities have the political and fiscal power to be held accountable by their citizens?” The “best shot at urban poverty,” he argues, “isn’t by targeting slums.” Rather, “it’s the rise of community-based organizations as mechanisms for poor citizens to demand accountability of mayors and councils … A more nimble state is a decentralized one; letting people have their own local government gives them faith in the overall nation state.”

The digital data era may also prove revolutionary. In Bangladesh, the bank is even working with cell phone service providers to post text messages telling about national government monies flowing to city halls because–as Ahmad puts it– “the power of information is so critical to a decentralized system.”

The skeptic can say local democracy doesn’t guarantee honest government, or always combat the cancer of corruption that’s so often just favors elites. Nor does it stop local governments from trying to bulldoze slums instead of recognizing them as beehives of human activity and entrepreneurship that cry out for upgrading, and extending basic services, not destruction.

But in time, a strong peoples’ voice can curb narrow self-interested political control. As a partner, the bank can make a real difference–helping finance, for example, growing cities’ public transit networks to help guide sustainable growth patterns and benefit all social classes, not just the privileged few.

A bank as an agent of global democracy? Why not?

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