What's New at the ADB?
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) now asserts that poverty reduction is its
overarching institutional goal. It claims that all its other strategic objectives--economic
growth, human development, sound environmental management and improving the
status of women--will henceforth be pursued in such a way that they directly
contribute to poverty reduction.
But the ADB has no clue how to reduce poverty. In adopting the poverty reduction
rhetoric, it is merely following the lead of the World Bank and its other
multilateral peers who successfully negotiated the transition in their rhetoric
a long time ago. A relative "laggard" in the development business,
the ADB is the last of the multilateral institutions to declare full and complete
dedication to the reduction of poverty. And in so doing, it hopes to divert
attention away from emerging evidence and criticism of its abysmal failure
as a bank as well as a development institution. It now talks about sustainable
human development, gender equality, environmental protection and participation,
but it is clearly at a loss as to how these terms can be translated into action.
The ADB's Poverty Reduction Strategy proposes nothing new in terms of understanding,
or tackling poverty. What it does is use poverty rhetoric to dress up the
only business it knows: market based economic growth, liberalisation of trade
and investment; deregulation, or minimising the role of the State in governing
the economy' and privatisation, with an ever expanding role for the private
sector in the production and delivery of goods and services. The strategic
goal of these initiatives has not been poverty reduction, but the rapid integration
of local and national economic activities into the global market economy.
Far from reducing poverty, the ADB's version of development has contributed
greatly towards the impoverishment of people in the Asia and Pacific.
The poverty rhetoric is important to the ADB from the point of view of institutional
survival. The ADB needs the discourse of poverty. By committing itself to
research and documentation about poverty ("expanding the knowledge base")
it attempts to sets itself up as a poverty expert, and the key producer and
disseminator of knowledge about poverty and development in the region. Through
such a discourse it can exercise influence about how poverty is perceived
and approached, and in the design of anti-poverty programmes. The poverty
discourse thus serves the ADB in two critical ways. One, it provides a moral-ethical
cloak for it's poorly conceived and destructive development policies and practices.
Second, it ensures that there will always be a steady supply of "poor"
to keep it in business.
The ADB defines poverty as a state of deprivation of essential assets and
opportunities which arise from a shortage of capital by which these assets
and opportunities can either be produced or purchased. Accordingly, poverty
reduction calls for the creation of a situation in which the poor are enabled
to acquire the assets required to achieve a "minimally acceptable level
of existence. But this too is not new. Set into motion more than fifty years
ago by the United States, Great Britain, the Bretton Wood Institutions and
the United Nations, the "shortage of capital" approach development
has so completely dominated anti-poverty programmes that today, the theory
has become a morbid reality: the poor are indeed deprived of assets and opportunities;
there is a perpetual shortage of capital investment in areas critical to the
poor; and worst of all, despite the billions of dollars that have been channeled
into so-called poverty reduction programmes, the poor do not appear to be
in a better position than before to acquire those assets and opportunities
they need to redeem their condition of deprivation.
The picture is indeed dismal. The 1999 UNDP Human Development Report reveals
that worldwide, an estimated 1.3 billion people live on incomes of less than
$ 1 a day. More than a quarter of the 4.5 billion people in developing countries
still do not have what the world considers some of life's most basic choices
such as survival beyond the age of 40, access to knowledge and minimum public
services. More than 880 million people lack access to health services, nearly
1.3 billion people do not have access to clean water, and 2.6 billion people
lack access to basic sanitation. About 840 million people in the world are
malnourished and the richest fifth of the world consume 16 times more than
the poorest fifth.
Close to 900 million of the world's poor (i.e., those who survive on less
than US $ 1 a day) live in the Asia and Pacific region, and nearly one in
three Asians are poor using this same standard. More than half of world poverty
is concentrated in the Asia and Pacific region. And the ADB--along with its
mentors, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)--has played
a significant role in bringing this situation about. The combined policy demands
of these three instititutions have entrenched social, economic and political
inequalities, increased absolute poverty for many, weakened the economic sovereignty
of countries by increasing dependency on external financing, and led to widespread
environmental degradation in the region. The increasing domination of their
neo-liberal vision of the world has narrowed opportunities for the emergence
of local, national and regional development alternatives.
An Institution for Asia and the Pacific
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) was established in 1966 as a regional Multilateral
Development Bank (MDB) to finance activities that would foster economic growth,
development and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region. Although its primary
founding members were Japan and the United States, it now consists of 57 member
countries--41 from Asia and the Pacific, and 16 non-regional. The ADB's top
stockholders are Japan, the United States, the Peoples' Republic of China,
India, Australia, Indonesia, Canada and Korea. Interestingly, the majority
of the ADB's members--Developing Member Countries [DMCs] are debtors to the
ADB. The ADB is a public sector institution supported by taxpayers in all
its member countries, either in the form of direct financing of the institution's
portfolios, or in the form of debt repayment.
Established in the image of the World Bank, the ADB currently enjoys unprecedented
economic and political power in Asia. Between 1996 and 1998, the ADB's commitment
to assistance in the region was US $ 20.6 billion, second only to the World
Bank at US $ 28.7 billion. Since the start of its operations in 1966, the
ADB has poured more than US $ 111 billion into the region, of which at least
US $ 82 billion are in direct credits from the Bank itself, and another US
$ 30 billion through co-financed capital, primarily in the form of non-concessionary
loans. In 1997, the total accumulated external debt in the Asia Pacific region
was US $ 805.4 billion. Compared against the total ADB lending and co-financing
to date of US $111.9 billion, it can be assumed that more than ten percent
of the total external debt of the Asia Pacific is owed to the ADB.
The eight largest debtor countries to the ADB are Indonesia (US $ 16,008 million),
Pakistan (US $ 9,471 million), China (US $ 8,166 million), The Philippines
(US $ 7,286 million), India (US $ 7,253.3 million), Thailand (US $ 4,984 million),
Malaysia (US $ 1,987 million) and Vietnam (US $ 1,655 million). The top eight
countries with more than a third of their total external debt owed to the
ADB are Bhutan (73 %), Nepal (68 %), Samoa (62 %), Mongolia (52%), Solomons
(51 %), Bangladesh (37 %), Malaysia (33 %) and Pakistan (32 %).
The ADB's activities range from providing loans (concessional and ordinary),
facilitating capital investment, and technical assistance to governments and
private companies in its developing member countries (DMCs). Its approach
to development is based on a fundamental belief in rapid modernisation, market
capitalism, and the integration of all economic activity into the global marketplace.
While these beliefs are no different from the neo-liberal agendas promoted
by other International Financial Institutions (IFIs), the ADB has sought to
promote an "Asian" identity for itself by claiming to be rooted
in the region, and by claiming to advance regional understanding and cooperation
through programmes designed to respond to the particularities of the region.
The ADB has mobilised both public and private capital for financing development
activities through co-financing schemes with multilateral, bilateral and private
financial institutions. Central to this has been the promotion of public-private
"partnerships" between governments and private companies in physical
infrastructure projects in which, the ADB has provided loans for government
equity and partial risk guarantees to the private investors. Another notable
feature of the ADB has been its role in facilitating technical assistance
to its DMCs through multilateral and bilateral funds. However, the majority
of the ABD's "assistance" to its DMCs has been in the form of loans
and even pre-paid technical assistance is usually contingent upon concurrent
loan regimens.
Who's Interests?
The ADB insists that it has always been concerned with poverty alleviation
and that its approach to development encompasses a wide range of social and
environmental concerns, including women's empowerment, civil society participation
and environmental protection. However, in the footsteps of its institutional
peers--the World Bank and IMF--financing from the ADB, whether in the form
of grants or loans, is generally accompanied by conditionalities that undermine
the very issues it declares concern for.
ADB conditionalities range from the introduction of new policies and laws
to protect specific investments (as in infrastructure projects) to reforms
of entire sectors (as in the case of the agriculture sector in Thailand and
the energy sector in Indonesia. Some of the more common elements of these
conditionalities are: liberalisation of trade and investment; increased control
by the private sector over the production and delivery of goods and services;
full cost recovery of all investments whether public or private; dismantling
of State subsidies for public goods and services; privatisation of State enterprises;
transfer of resource use and tenure rights from public and common pool to
private ownership; deregulation of pricing and markets; and an overall withdrawal
of the State in direct economic activity and governance. Reforms of the financial
and legal sectors, and the introduction of new, market-friendly regulatory
mechanisms have been particularly important to the ADB's strategy of increasing
foreign and domestic private investment in infrastructure, economic and social
development.
Until the early nineties, the ADB was quite successful in avoiding public
scrutiny about its policies and operations. Unlike the World Bank or the IMF,
the ADB's sphere of influence is regionally limited. And the Asia-Pacific
region is a geographically, economically, culturally and politically diverse
region. While intense pockets of poverty exist in its different sub-regions,
it is also overall a region of significant wealth accumulated through generations
of capital and resource appropriation, and a buildup of domestic savings.
Asian countries have pursued distinctly different paths towards modernisation
and development which have been financed through a multitude of sources ranging
from domestic and foreign private investments to bilateral and multilateral
development assistance and credits. Consequently, the influence of MDBs on
the various countries in the region have also been varied owing to differences
in their respective political and economic capacities.
But as more evidence emerges about the destructive impacts of its projects
and interventions, the ADB is facing growing region-wide criticism of its
policies and operations, as well as of the manner in which it does business.
Despite its claims to the contrary, the ADB is a highly centralised and unaccountable
institution, which does not serve broad-based public interest. At an institutional
level, the Bank's key policy and programme decisions are taken by its Governors
and Board of Directors, who also determine the direction of its operations
and relations with borrowing countries. At the country level, Bank and government
negotiations about programmes proceed without broad based, inclusive public
input or participation.
Neither the Board of Directors nor ADB staff represent the interests of majority
of the region's people. ADB policies also have little to do with addressing
the problems or challenges faced by the poor in borrowing countries. On the
contrary, ADB policies reflect a gross and undifferentiated view of a diverse
reality, and further the interests of its wealthy Asian and non-Asian stockholders
and financial contributors. The ADB pays no penalty for bad decisions on loans
or projects. These impacts are disproportionately borne by the very people
who the Bank is not responsible to but uses to justify its existence, i.e.,
the poor.
It fact, it is difficult to understand what the ADB when it refers to "gender
and development" and "participation." The urban or rural poor
certainly did not participate in the design of programmes or reforms that
have led to the displacement and dispersion of families, environmental degradation,
the alienation of entire communities from natural resources and livelihood
sources, increased debt, decreased access to clean water, sanitation and basic
healthcare, and their attendant increase in the hardships on women
"Thinking Poverty"
By its own admission, the ADB is moving away from its former project oriented
role towards becoming a broad based development institution that promotes
policy and institutional reform, regional cooperation and private sector development.
These policies provide the broad framework for operationalising its poverty
reduction strategy which consist of "pro-poor" sustainable economic
growth, social development and good governance.
A noteworthy aspect of the ADB's poverty reduction strategy is its commitment
to strengthen its own knowledge, capacity and skills, and ensure that all
its departments acquire the requisite expertise in anti-poverty activities.
Just as salesmen are encouraged to think "sales" at all times, the
ADB staff shall "think poverty" at all times. New staff and consultants
shall be hired and training will be provided for all personnel in poverty
reduction methodologies and techniques. Country and region wide studies on
poverty will be undertaken, poverty research indicators and data will be developed,
handbooks and manuals on poverty interventions will be produced, and conferences
and fora on poverty reduction will be organised. New policy tools and lending
instruments to finance poverty operations will be developed, and of course,
new lending targets will be established.
In other words, by setting itself up as the expert institution on poverty
in the region, the ADB will consolidate its power on the discourse of poverty
and development in the Asia and Pacific. It will also be better positioned
to shield itself from critiques of its projects, lending practices and methods
of operation.
The Poverty Reduction Strategy: New Packaging for an Old Product
The poverty reduction strategy reiterates the ADB's firm belief in markets
as the primary source of assets and opportunities that the poor, and in fact
all in society need in order to grow towards a better future. According to
the ADB, markets must be nurtured and allowed to reach their full potential
by the removal of market distorting interventions such as public service and
credit subsidies, pricing controls, state owned enterprises, import-export
restrictions and overvalued exchange rates. It claims that competitive markets
can do better what governments have attempted to do in the past: the production
of public goods and services. Liberalising markets and dismantling all forms
of control or regulation over market operations (as the assertion goes) would
increase efficiency of production and stimulate economic growth, which in
turn would provide employment and incomes, and eventually reduce poverty.
Private sector development (PSD) is central to the poverty reduction strategy
and will receive renewed support. The ADB claims that given the limited capacity
and mixed track record of the public sector, the private sector must become
the "engine of growth." PSD is, of course, not new to the ADB and
encompasses a range of activities from support for domestic entrepreneurs
to region wide economic cooperation programmes. Many PSD efforts are couched
in the language of public-private partnerships, whereby public funds are used
to provide sufficient incentives and guarantees and ensure an appropriate
"comfort level" for private sector expansion
The ADB advocates expanding the role of the private sector from its present
involvement in physical infrastructure projects (such as energy, water, transport
and telecommunication) into the domain of public goods and services, economic
and social infrastructure, and basic services such as education, health, nutrition,
water and sanitation. The ADB plans to use its private sector assistance window
to strengthen the financial, institutional and managerial capacity of the
private sector through activities such as co-financing, technical assistance
and capacity building. At the same time, the ADB will use its public sector
assistance window to enforce a hospitable macroeconomic, policy, legal and
regulatory environment (an "enabling environment") for the "flourishing"
of the private sector, such as more open trade and investment policies, deregulation
of pricing, and other market favouring interventions. The agriculture sector
would receive special attention. According to the ADB, increasing the market
orientation of agriculture, all the way from pricing of inputs to management
of natural resources will have tremendous impact on poverty reduction since
the majority of Asia's poor derive their livelihood from agricultural production
And what of governments? The ADB has a role for them too in their principle
of "good governance." Good governance in ADB parlance means re-orienting
the work, capacity and resources of government to support economic restructuring
and the private sector. This would be achieved through the development of
new legal, regulatory and institutional frameworks for the development of
markets, competition, market pricing, predictability, stability of operations,
etc. The commercialisation and privatisation of state enterprises are highlighted
in the ADB's idea of good governance. The argument goes that a combination
of privatised property rights and competitive markets will lead to the efficient
utilisation and redirection of assets. They will also miraculously reduce
corruption. Since full cost recovery and profits will replace public service
and responsibility as motivating factors, privatised enterprises will necessarily
create more goods and services for public consumption, and the poor will of
course benefit. But here too, the ADB is quick to point out that these gains
can only be possible within a wider institutional setting which in turn can
only be achieved through the neo-liberal reforms that it has proposed all
along.
Majority of the ADB's policy experiments are brought together in its programme
for sub-regional economic cooperation. Central to its core mandate of fostering
regional economic development, sub- and regional economic cooperation was
unable to take off in the ADB's early years for a number of reasons. Deep
rooted political-ideological divisions within Asia and the prevalence of nation-building
sentiments resulted in countries focusing efforts on strengthening their respective
national political and economic spheres. Given geopolitical conflicts and
limited opportunities for trade within the region, neighboring countries often
viewed each other as economic competitors or security threats. This situation
changed considerably in the eighties as socialist countries started to open
up, export oriented economic models gained favour in East and Southeast Asia,
and new opportunities for trade and investment started to emerge within the
region. Intra-regional economic cooperation started to elicit particular interest
among industrialising countries, since it was seen as offering countries wider
markets close to home which would allow Asian corporations to become stronger
and compete more successfully in global markets. There was also the hope that
as the region became less dependant on trade and investments from the West,
opportunities to strengthen regional peace, security and stability would increase.
Well positioned to respond to these changes, by the end of the eighties, the
ADB launched its strategy for regional economic cooperation and development.
Thus far, this strategy has largely consisted of two elements: 1) loans and
grants for Regional Technical Assistance (RETA) for project/programme feasibility
studies, project/programme preparation, training of project/programme personnel
and regional conferences to promote project/programmes; and 2) direct loans
and co-financing for specific projects such as dams, roads and telecommunications
through programmes such as the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) and the BIMP
EAGA.. Interestingly, the original idea of regional growth "polygons"
was not entirely an ADB invention, but was developed by early Asian Tigers
such as Singapore and Malaysia. The ADB subsequently adopted and expanded
the idea to the level of sub-regional "masterplans," which involve
huge financial outlays, technical inputs, management capacity and regulatory
frameworks. The ADB also reserved for itself the role of a catalyst or third
party facilitator of private capital by reducing the risks to investors through
co-financing, direct loan guarantees and the facilitation of government guarantees
on returns to investments.
The GMS brings together the countries of Myanmar, the Lao PDR, Thailand, Cambodia,
Vietnam and the province of Yunan in Southern China in a masterplan of cooperation
on transport, energy, tourism, human resource development, telecommunications,
trade and investment, and environment projects. A primary attraction of the
GMS for planners and investors is the vast and as yet unexploited potential
of natural resources in the region ranging from water, fisheries and forests
to coal, gas and petroleum reserves. The BIMP EAGA brings together the countries
of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Indonesia (BIMP) in an East ASEAN Growth
Area (EAGA). Initiatives under this masterplan range from policy frameworks
to facilitate cross border movement of goods, capital, technology and labour,
and commercial investments in agriculture, fisheries, agro-processing, skills
development, tourism and export oriented manufacturing. In both cases, the
exploitation of natural resources are central motifs and the exports of timber,
forest resources, raw materials and energy have priority.
The ADB proudly touts the advantages of the sub-regional cooperation models
that make them more attractive to private investors and accelerate business
opportunities: lower risks and costs to the investors, non discriminatory
to the source of capital, no cumbersome national laws or regulations to hamper
investment opportunities, participating countries agree to essential infrastructure
and special policies that are more liberal than national policies to attract
capital, and natural resources used not to contribute towards national self-sufficiency,
but to respond to regional imperatives. According to the ADB, the above will
accelerate development through increased trade and investment, and since many
of these programmes involve "lagging parts" of national economies,
they could "potentially" contribute directly to poverty reduction.
Keeping the Poor in their Place
The ADB's poverty reduction strategy claims that it has learned much from
its past efforts about how to address the various dimensions of poverty. With
all the billions spent and parallel debt incurred, someone certainly should
have learned something, but what are these lessons? And how have they informed
the Bank's future plans?
The model of development promoted and financed by the ADB has not reduced
poverty in any absolute sense. On the contrary, it has served to perpetuate
the fiction that poverty can be reduced by the infusion of large amounts of
capital along the lines prescribed by the ADB and other believers in market
solutions to poverty. As some groups of people succeed in raising their incomes
to survive above the minimum standard of US $ 1 a day, more take their place.
And what of those who cross the line anyway? Are they able to exercise their
"right to be reasonably rewarded, as well as have some protection from
external shocks?" Recent experience in the region does not bear this
out.
The policy reforms insisted upon by the ADB have contributed to serious setbacks
for the poor in borrowing countries. The withdrawal of the State from the
provision of social infrastructure and the dismantling of government subsidies
for basic services have severely constrained the access of the poor to food,
basic education, healthcare and sanitation, and with the current policy trend,
this will likely get worse. Privatisation and corporatisation of state enterprises
have led to the retrenchment of workers whose opportunities for re-employment
are curtailed by simultaneous downsizing of other enterprises in order to
keep production streamlined and efficient. The burden of external debt repayments
and the need to maintain upward growth figures have further curtailed government
abilities to provide and maintain safety nets for the most vulnerable populations.
The rush to orient domestic agricultural production towards export markets,
the removal of pricing controls for agricultural products, and the infusion
of local markets with external goods have reduced the competitiveness and
stability of local agricultural producers in their own societies. Their ability
to benefit from the so-called "economic vibrancy" of market based
production has been weakened rather than strengthened by deteriorating terms
of trade resulting from sudden shifts to unregulated, open markets. With increased
dependency on external and often costly agricultural inputs, small farming
families in countries such as Thailand, India, the Philippines and South Korea
have grown deeper in debt and in many instances have lost their assets altogether.
Rural to urban migration has increased as impoverished farming families are
displaced from traditional occupations.
In a number of Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Cambodia, and
the Philippines are only some examples), rapid liberalisation of trade and
investment, and the obsession with economic growth have led to the establishment
of sub-contract factories and sweatshops where workers are paid less than
minimum wage and work 12 to15 hour work days. It is often to these factories
that rural migrants and family members of entrenched workers come to find
the employment that results from the "pro-poor" economic growth
that the ADB promotes. Children drop out of school-if they enroll to begin
with-because their labour is essential for their families to be able to inch
towards that invisible poverty line. Governments withhold increases in minimum
wages, workers' insurance and welfare benefits since the extra costs of protecting
this "human capital" would make economic growth more expensive,
thus reducing revenues and discouraging investors.
The ADB's promotion of private sector expansion has generated its own special
problems. In support of public-private partnerships, the ADB has argued that
through the involvement of the private sector, economic risks can be better
distributed among those who can best absorb them. A win-win situation in which
capital deficit governments can access resources to build, operate and maintain
infrastructure and production capacity without its attendant challenges or
risks. But in practice, the opposite has happened. In order to attract private
capital, governments have entered into agreements through which economic risks
and responsibility are unevenly borne by governments and eventually by the
public through levys, taxes, price increases, debt repayments, etc. The private
sector, in most cases, has got away with a disproportionate share of profits
and privileges. Infrastructure projects such as roads, dams, energy production
units and waste management plants have externalised social and environmental
costs, which again have been transferred onto the public realm in the form
of social, environmental and long term economic mitigation. The role of governments
as owners/investors as well as regulators in public-private partnership schemes
have resulted in governmental inability to protect the public interest in
an effort to recoup investments.
The sub-regional economic polygons promoted by the ADB are essentially large
scale export processing zones, where private companies have disproportionately
more power than the participating governments about the nature and direction
of investments. At the heart of these zones are the most coveted resources
of the region--land, energy deposits, water, forests and bio-diversity--which
offer numerous profits for outside investors and those countries that are
economically powerful enough to negotiate their interests (A major road project
in the East West Corridor of the GMS that links Vietnam, the Lao PDR and Thailand
has already been sharply criticised by Lao officials as heaping costs on the
Lao PDR while providing benefits to Vietnam and Thailand). But these models
also widened internal disparities among the participating territories, and
disrupt national economic and social cohesion by creating pockets of high
capital and infrastructure investment in an otherwise under-serviced region.
Under the special rules that operate in these sub-regional economic zones,
the rights of local populations to natural resources such as land, water,
fish and forests have been critically threatened. Customary resource tenure
and use systems have been frequently over-ridden by governments in favour
of privatised ownership leading to decreased food and economic security among
local communities. Large scale energy projects and clearing of forests for
commercial logging, plantations, roads, mining, industry and commercial agriculture
have displaced subsistence farmers and indigenous communities, usually with
little compensation. The Mekong river basin is a vast, complex and rich ecological
system that provides sustenance for million of people in the sub-region. But
under the GMS cooperation programme, natural resources and people are reduced
to little more than raw materials and cheap, dispensable labour.
The ADB's conceptualisation of good governance has and certainly will be good
for large private interests and national elites who will benefit from easy
access to natural resources and cheap labour, and the transference of commercial
risks to the public at large. But this conceptualisation does not include
addressing deeply rooted economic and social inequities, or support for basic
human rights to resources, safe environments and freedom of expression, the
rights of labour to organise and negotiate better deals for workers, the rights
of indigenous peoples to self determination, the rights of peasant farmers
to own and protect the land they farm, and the rights of women to a safe social
environment. Good governance will do little for the poor, particularly women,
as governments are increasingly unable (and often unwilling) to protect and
ensure their rights to decent livelihoods, social services and economic security.
Admittedly, the ADB is not single-handedly responsible for the creation or
entrenchment of poverty in the region. It has had plenty of help from the
World Bank, the IMF and country governments both within and outside the region.
And a lesson that none of them seem to have learned is that the private sector
is not the messiah of development, nor do benefits necessarily accrue to all
from open, deregulated, private sector led and market based development. The
private sector has its role, and an important one, granted. But without strong
public oversight and the counter-veiling power of civil society, such a model
serves to entrench inequity, injustice and poverty. The Asian economic crisis
was a crisis of gross mismanagement of the private sector, the result of which
has been the transference of private sector risks and financial burdens on
to the public at large and increased public debt.
One lesson that the ADB seems to have learned only too well is that it needs
the poor as much, if not more than the poor need the ADB. The magic of the
marketplace works best for the magicians themselves. For the ADB, this magic
is contingent on ensuring that despite the vast amounts of financial resources
that are poured into poverty reduction programmes, there will always be a
significant number of poor in the region.
Shape Up or Ship Out
The true experts on poverty are not the ADB and their cohorts, but the ordinary
people of Asia and the Pacific who have survived despite mainstream development
and poverty reduction programmes. Rooted in diverse and complex realities,
people in the region have been able to evolve their own ethical, cultural
and political solutions to imposed forms of material poverty. They have attempted
to rebuild their social and political fabric through solidarity movements,
sharing, protection and re-generation of common resources, and revival of
diverse, traditional forms of livelihoods. They have argued and showed through
their actions that solutions to modern poverty lie not in increased consumption
of material riches by a few, but in political, social and economic justice,
and in fair and equitable access to resources and knowledge by all.
There is a lot that the ADB can learn about poverty from these other discourses,
which are far more advanced, progressive and sophisticated than what the ADB
is capable producing. But the ADB's commitment to learning is driven by the
imperative of institutional re-generation, and not by a desire to understand
or address the conditions that cause poverty to begin with. Its reason for
existence is to keep itself in business and poverty provides it with a effective
justification. Unless it can radically restructure its own ideology, principles
and practices, the ADB should put an end to this expensive pretence that it
calls poverty reduction and just let people move on with their lives.