HOW CAN THE MINING INDUSTRY CONTRIBUTE TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN THE PACIFIC? Colin Filer Australian National University Introduction Anthropologist Stuart Kirsch has recently described the concept of ‘sustainable mining’ as a ‘corporate oxymoron’ – a contradiction in terms that merely serves to deflect criticism of the massive environmental damage caused by the mining industry. I recall the same phrase being used by a lady in PNG’s Department of National Planning to make fun of the work which I and some other colleagues were undertaking for PNG’s Department of Mining back in 2002, when we were charged with the production of a sustainable development policy for PNG’s mining sector. The standard response is to say that ‘sustainable mining’ is indeed a contradiction in terms, and for that very reason it is not a phrase normally used in mining industry circles or mineral policy circles. Mining is inherently unsustainable in the sense that it involves the exploitation of non‐renewable resources, and that is why no mine lasts forever. On the other hand, the mining industry does not close down, it just moves on from one mine to the next. The question then is whether mining companies can reasonably claim that their activities contribute to that strange thing called ‘sustainable development’, or whether such claims should simply be treated as corporate propaganda. Kirsch thinks that the mining industry can only claim to be ‘sustainable’, or to make a positive contribution to ‘sustainable development’, by adopting the weak definition of sustainability which allows for trade‐offs to be made between economic benefits and environmental costs, or for the sacrifice of natural capital to be justified by the creation of other forms of capital. By this account, the industry can rest its case on the proposition that eggs have to be broken in the process of making an omelette, and so long as the omelette is worth more than the eggs, the cooking will be sustainable. But Kirsch prefers the strong definition of sustainability that is supported by a different metaphor. An increase in the number of fishing boats cannot compensate for a decline in the number of fish, and for the same reason, nothing which the mining industry produces can compensate for the value of the things that it destroys. I think there are two key problems with this line of argument. First, it misrepresents the claims that are actually being made by mining companies, regardless of whether those claims are well founded. And second, it ignores the question of whether life as we know it is sustainable without the mining industry, and if not, what kind of mining industry there ought to be and where it ought to be. When Kirsch discusses the difference between strong and weak definitions of sustainability, he notes that this discussion was also present in the final report of the Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD) Project, published in 2002. What he fails to observe is that the MMSD Project was itself the result of an initiative taken four years previously, by the chief executives of some of the 2 world’s biggest mining companies, and its final report has since functioned as a sort of charter for the industry’s international peak body, the International Council for Mining and Metals. Having participated in the MMSD Project myself, I can vouch for the fact that it was part of a paradigm shift in which the discourse of sustainability (and corporate social responsibility) suddenly acquired great significance for some sections of the mining industry, especially the big multinational companies. This was not a discourse about eggs and omelettes, but about a whole range of issues which some company executives have described as their ‘social licence to operate’. What makes the appearance of this new discourse of sustainability especially relevant to any discussion of mining in the Pacific island region is that the Bougainville, Freeport and Ok Tedi mines had all become internationally famous (or infamous) as examples of why that licence had been lost. Indeed, the main reason why Stuart Kirsch has no time for the new discourse of sustainability is that the Ok Tedi mine continues to cause huge environmental damage while the 51 percent of it that used to belong to BHP Billiton now belongs to something called the PNG Sustainable Development Program. That surely does seem like a contradiction in terms. Now if the mining industry has a proven record of producing environmental, social and political disasters in the New Guinea region or the Pacific island region more generally, what is to be done about it? Folk like Stuart Kirsch might say that it ought to be banned, or at the very least, that respectable people should do everything in their power to embarrass the perpetrators of these evil deeds. Ten years ago, while some respectable folk like me were trying to show the mining industry the road to sustainability, or even helping the PNG government to formulate a sustainable development policy for the mining sector, other folk were simply demanding an end to the development of new large‐scale mining projects in developing countries. But is there any point in making such demands if decision makers in these countries are convinced that the economic benefits of such investments outweigh the environmental costs, or that omelettes are preferable to eggs. And if the owners or managers of some mining companies are persuaded that there are some countries in which their investments are unlikely to contribute to sustainable development, why should those countries not attract investment from other mining companies whose owners or managers are not so scrupulous? The difference in a decade Ten years ago, it could be argued that the discourse of sustainability was causing the world’s more ‘respectable’ mining companies to evacuate themselves from those parts of the Third World where their reputations could easily be put at risk by various forms of social, political, economic and environmental instability, and to focus their new investments on nice safe countries like Australia and Canada. BHP Billiton got out of PNG in 2001, and Rio Tinto followed suit in 2005. That was the year in which the Metallurgical and Construction Corporation of China secured a ten‐year tax holiday from the PNG government in return for developing the Ramu nickel mine, and some people have taken this project as evidence that PNG is racing back to the dark depths of unsustainable development. However, as we all know, the extractive industry sector then started booming on the back of a surge in mineral commodity prices, and PNG suddenly looked a whole lot more attractive to investors who had previously marked it down as basket‐case of excessive risk. The current resource boom in PNG is led by ExxonMobil’s liquid natural gas project, now half way through its 4‐year construction phase, but the whole country has now become a patchwork quilt of mining exploration licences and petroleum prospecting licences. BHP 3 Billiton has forgotten the embarrassment of Ok Tedi and joined the search for new deposits in a different part of the country. And Rio Tinto is happy to talk to the Autonomous Government of Bougainville about the prospect of re‐opening the Panguna copper mine, not least because most Bougainvilleans seem to have decided that mineral revenues are a good thing after all, so long as they don’t have to be shared with the rest of PNG. The current resource boom in PNG is not yet reflected in export revenues: the value of mineral exports as a share of total exports actually fell from 82 percent in 2006 to 75 percent in 2010. But it is certainly reflected in the labour market, where 30,000 people are currently employed full‐time in the work of exploration, construction and extraction. Furthermore, hundreds of Papua New Guinean workers have found employment in Australia’s booming resource sector since 2007, so the companies operating in PNG have been highly proactive in the recruitment and training of new workers, many of whom have been ‘drained’ from other sectors of the national economy. Much like Australia, PNG is now showing symptoms of the so‐called Dutch Disease on an unprecedented scale. So Port Moresby is not only one of the most dangerous cities on earth; it also boasts some of the most exorbitant accommodation costs. All this may not last too long because the gas project alone accounts for a large part of the boom in national employment and the shortage of accommodation in the national capital, and once it becomes operational in two years time, the workforce will shrink to a fraction if its present size. On the other hand, once it does become operational, the extractive industry sector will be responsible for an even larger share of the country’s export earnings and the government’s tax revenues than it is already. And in the meantime, with all the exploration that is going on, there may be new projects under construction in both the mining and petroleum sectors. If PNG has previously been the victim of a ‘resource curse’, it could be heading into even deeper trouble. In which case, we must ask again how foreign investors in these two sectors, with or without the assistance of the government, will be able to claim that they have made a contribution to sustainable development. And since the boom is clearly spreading to other parts of the Pacific island region, we also need to pose this question on a larger regional scale. I shall try to deal with this question primarily in relation to the mining industry, rather than the oil and gas industry, because the oil and gas industry did not participate directly in the global debate about ‘mining, minerals and sustainable development’ that took place between 1998 and 2002. If that debate produced a new sort of corporate responsibility paradigm for the mining industry, then answers to the question can be framed by four alternative hypotheses: 1. All mining companies are equally incapable of contributing to sustainable development in any country or region; they only differ in their capacity to cover their tracks by means of false advertising. This would seem to be the gist of what Stuart Kirsch is saying. 2. Some mining companies (perhaps the bigger companies) are making a bigger contribution than others, in all of the countries and regions where they operate, either because they are willing to bear the extra cost of doing so, or else because they subscribe to the so‐called ‘business case’ for corporate responsibility. This is what most industry spokesmen would argue. 3. The mining industry makes a bigger contribution to sustainable development in some countries or regions than it does in other countries or regions because the incentive structures vary from one place to another. This is the sort of argument one might expect from the World Bank. 4 4. The mining industry makes a bigger contribution to sustainable development in periods when profit margins are low than it does when profits are high, business is booming, and companies are busy competing for access to new resources. Now the last of these arguments might seem counter‐intuitive, because mining companies can surely afford to spend more on the achievement of sustainable development outcomes when business is booming. But we should not forget that the period of corporate soul searching that took place between 1998 and 2002 actually happened during a period of stagnation in the mining industry. I can well recall industry bigwigs like Bob Wilson and Hugh Morgan bemoaning the fact that mining companies were then looking at 3 percent rates of return on their investments, and then proceeding to argue that these low rates of return were the main reason why the industry had to raise its game. In the final report of the MMSD Project, this argument was framed in terms of a distinction between the old ‘cost culture’, in which companies would respond to hard times by simply cutting costs and raising productivity, and the new ‘value culture’, in which some companies would steal a march over their rivals by persuading financial markets and institutions to invest in the superior quality of their management decisions. This was the ‘business case’ for corporate social responsibility. And it made economic sense to the world’s biggest mining companies because they were trying to raise new capital on the strength of their global balance sheets, and then use this capital as leverage in a series of mergers and acquisitions that would strengthen their hold on specific segments of the commodity market. A smaller club of larger corporate citizens could then control the rate at which new mineral reserves were brought into production, restore the industry to healthier profit margins, avoid the need to get tangled up in a lot of risky places like PNG, and enhance their public reputations at the same time. And for a time, the trick appeared to work. But then the business cycle took another turn, global demand for some mineral commodities leapt ahead of corporate expectations, and all the companies were back in a scramble to develop new resources wherever they might be found. Does this mean that the big mining companies are now too busy ramping up the scale of their global operations to do more than pay lip service to all the international standards of corporate responsibility whose production has since become a separate industry? If so, then Kirsch may be right – or at least his argument may have more weight now than it had ten years ago. But the trouble with arguments like these is that hard evidence is hard to come by, unless we can get a better handle on the institutions and processes through which the concept of sustainable development is related to the impact of large‐scale mining operations in specific locations. Pillars, paradigms and impacts [MOSTLY SLIDES] Menacing the mining industry The mining industry’s general preference for nice safe countries like Australia over risky countries like PNG may be construed by some people as a logical preference for investing in places where the industry is properly regulated, mineral revenues are properly managed, and mining companies therefore find it easier to claim that they are making a positive contribution to sustainable development. Anyone who 5 thinks along these lines would be well‐advised to read Paul Cleary’s latest book, Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future. Cleary shows how the mining boom has placed so much economic and political power in the hands of an industry dominated by foreign investors that it can simply get rid of a prime minister who tries to raise more tax revenues from its huge profits, and can likewise impose its will on those state governments that are now largely dependent on mineral royalties to pay off their debts. But while Australian politicians cross the mining industry at their peril, their counterparts in PNG seem far less subservient. Indeed, PNG politicians with large mines in their electorates appear to be the most objectionable. That is because the vast majority of Papua New Guineans think of themselves, first and foremost, as customary landowners, and thus believe that they have the right to extract the maximum possible amount of rent from any mining company that strays onto their land. When a change of government took place in PNG earlier this year, Byron Chan was appointed as the new Minister for Mining, and Boka Kondra was appointed as his deputy. Chan’s electorate just happens to contain the Lihir gold mine, while Kondra’s electorate contains the Ok Tedi copper mine. Kondra had previously been pushing for legislation to transfer ownership of all subsurface mineral resources from the state to the customary owners of the land that lies on top of them. Chan announced that he would now support this legislation. Shortly afterwards, I did an interview for the Pacific Beat radio program in which I suggested that the proposed amendments to the Mining Act, the Oil and Gas Act, and the Land Act could have some rather unfortunate effects if they were made into law. This caused one anonymous member of PNG’s blogging fraternity to call me a ‘brown‐nosed table cat’, by which he seems to have meant that I am nothing but a puppet of wicked foreign capitalists. Stuart Kirsch might even agree with this accusation. Most members of the anti‐mining lobby in PNG do seem to believe that the national interest and the cause of sustainable development would both best be served if customary landowners were indeed to become the owners of all the resources buried beneath their land, and the national government would long since have passed laws to this effect if it were not for political pressure exerted by the wicked foreign barons of the mining industry. But I do wonder how many of them have actually read the proposed amendments and thought about their implications. The amendments in question were actually drafted by a senior Papua New Guinean lawyer, Peter Donigi, who has presented and justified them as a means of lifting what he calls ‘the veil that shrouds Papua New Guinea’ (Donigi 2010). In Donigi’s view, the ‘veil’ consists of the exercise of colonial and neo‐colonial state power to exclude the indigenous people of PNG from owning or controlling things to which they have a customary right. He grounds his legal argument on Section 53 of the National Constitution, which deals with the protection of citizens from ‘unjust deprivation of property’, and on Article 26(2) of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which says that ‘[i]ndigenous peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or other traditional occupation or use, as well as those which they have otherwise acquired’. He deals with the relationship between ‘lands, territories and resources’ by proposing amendments to the Land Act that define ‘matter’ as ‘any substance that has mass and volume’, and then go on to say that ‘[t]he rights to and interests in any land includes all matter, minerals, petroleum and helium on, in or below the surface or sub‐surface or seabed of any land in Papua New Guinea’. But how would the rights and interests on PNG’s indigenous people be formally 6 recognized, given that there is currently no effective way for customary landowners to register formal titles to their own customary land, let alone to the ‘matter’ beneath it? Donigi answers this question by resorting to provisions in the Land Act that enable the state to lease customary land from incorporated groups of customary landowners and then grant a Special Agricultural and Business Lease over the same land to these same groups of landowners, or to other persons or organizations of which they approve, for periods of up to 99 years. The odd thing is that abuse of this so‐called ‘lease‐leaseback scheme’ over the course of the last eight years has caused more than 5 million hectares of customary land (11% of PNG’s total land area) to be alienated from customary ownership and placed in the hands of landowner companies. The directors of these landowner companies have then been doing deals with foreign logging companies to develop what they like to call ‘agro‐forestry’ projects, most of which have turned out to be short‐term salvage logging projects authorized on the pretext of developing large‐scale cash cropping projects that normally fail to materialize. Such is the political scandal surrounding this form of abuse that the national government was obliged by the pressure of public opinion to institute a commission of inquiry into the whole business, despite the fact that several national government ministers have been implicated in it. And those very same people who have abused me for questioning a proposal to use this very same lease‐leaseback scheme to place ownership of subsurface mineral resources in the hands of landowner companies and their foreign partners have actually been my allies in the campaign against the ‘agro‐forestry’ business. Such are the complexities of PNG politics. Donigi does propose amendments to those provisions of the Land Act that have allowed the ‘agro‐
forestry’ business to flourish, but my reading of these amendments gives me no reason to think that they would prevent the kind of abuse already documented in the forestry sector. It is not customary landowners who would end up owning sub‐surface mineral resources, but rather landowner company directors and their political patrons in the national parliament. Big foreign investors in the mining and petroleum sectors, unlike their smaller counterparts in the forestry sector, do not welcome this prospect at all, because they are not in the business of cheating local landowners out of their natural resources in a short period of time and sharing some of the proceeds with a few local politicians. They really do need to obtain some lasting landowner consent to a form of development that may last for several decades. Furthermore, under existing national laws and policies, these big companies already bear most of the cost of finding out who counts as a customary owner of any land included in their exploration licence areas, and Donigi’s proposals would require this question to be answered before an exploration licence can be issued, which would make life very difficult indeed. Those members of the national anti‐mining lobby who appear to support Donigi’s amendments, because they sound like a step in the right direction, are also amongst the most vociferous critics of the Ramu nickel mine, because they reckon that Chinese mining companies are even more irresponsible and less accountable that European, American or Australian mining companies. So they could be rather puzzled by Donigi’s observation that Asian investors (unlike their Western counterparts) are ‘not interested in profit alone’, but ‘are interested in a long term relationship with the country’ (Donigi 2010: 51). I do not know whether this remark reflects his admiration for the Metallurgical and Construction Corporation of China or his admiration for PNG’s biggest logging company, Rimbunan Hijau, but it certainly puts him in 7 a rather different political space from most of the populists who seek to defend the interests of customary landowners against those of foreign capitalists. If his proposals were to become law, some of these differences might take on a new political flavour. But what would be the economic impact? From my reading of the legislation, I suspect that the oil and gas industry would wither away, even if ExxonMobil’s gas project could somehow keep going under the terms of existing agreements between the government and local landowners, while the hard‐rock mining industry would gradually come to resemble the illegal mining industry in Indonesia, except that it would not be illegal. On the one hand, a contraction of large‐scale foreign investment in the mining and petroleum sectors might be a cause for celebration by members of the anti‐mining lobby, so they might applaud Donigi and his allies for achieving a sort of sustainable development by default. On the other hand, they would have no cause to rejoice over a legalized version of the small‐scale mining industry in Indonesia, because the social and environmental impacts would probably be just as bad, while customary landowners hosting mining projects on their land would receive less in the way of economic and financial benefits than they do under the current policy regime. It is unlikely that such hypotheses will be tested in reality, because the big foreign companies and their national allies have enough political clout to defend those key features of the current policy regime that suit their interests, and state ownership of mineral resources is certainly one of these. On the other hand, the industry does not have enough political clout to prevent some politicians and other representatives of the customary landed interest from making a great nuisance of themselves. This is the phenomenon that I have previously described as the ‘Melanesian way of menacing the mining industry’. I do not think this should be counted as a form of concerted opposition or resistance, since much of the nuisance is caused by people who are simply attempting to secure a bigger personal share of whatever economic benefits the industry supplies to the nation, and this commonly turns out to be a zero sum game. But it does mean that the national policy regime is continually modified or distorted in ways that do not suit the industry at all. And the question then is whether this actually makes it harder for the industry to demonstrate its contribution to sustainable development, or whether it provides the industry with a political excuse for failing to do so. Ungovernable Melanesian spaces [MOSTLY SLIDES] Unsustainable community development The political dynamics of mine‐affected areas may go some way to explain why mining companies find it hard to show that they have made a positive contribution to the sustainable development of local communities. However, we should not therefore suppose that local communities themselves bear most or all of the responsibility for corporate failures. Whatever the political context in which relationships are forged between mining projects and local communities, there are systemic problems in the management of such relationships that can best be described as problems of disconnected or disintegrated knowledge systems. The disconnection takes three different forms. 8 First, there is a temporal form of disconnection which is a function of the mining project cycle, the rapid turnover of management personnel in the mining industry, and periodic shocks such as mergers and takeovers or dramatic fluctuations in mineral commodity prices. These factors all lead to corporate amnesia, or the loss of institutional memory. From time to time, project managers commission consultants to write reports about what is going on in local communities, either to satisfy the needs of some external audience or because there are signs of trouble in the local relationship, but the knowledge does not accumulate over time in a way that leads to better decision making on the part of company management. Consultancy reports gather dust on shelves (or in containers), digital information is lost or corrupted, wheels are occasionally reinvented, and company managers end up knowing far less about the history and trajectory of company‐community relationships than what is known by local community members and the researchers who have taken an interest in these relationships through their occasional role as company consultants. Second, there is a vertical form of disconnection which is a function of internal corporate organization – the greater frequency of staff turnover at higher levels in the corporate hierarchy, the gaps between ‘headquarter knowledge’ and ‘project knowledge’ in companies with multiple operations, and the systemic under‐valuation of ‘community affairs’ in strategic decision making at the higher levels of the organization. It is common to find that the deepest knowledge of company‐community relationships at the project level is vested in locally recruited staff who do not have the capacity or incentive to communicate this knowledge to senior managers in a way that leads to better management of these relationships. Local staff may even develop a vested interest in actually concealing this knowledge from senior managers in order to gain some personal advantage from ‘managing’ these relationships in ways that are inconsistent with company policy. Finally, there is a horizontal form of disconnection which is a function of specialization in the forms of knowledge possessed by company managers at any particular level in the corporate hierarchy, and also by scientific consultants recruited from time to time to offer expert advice on particular issues. The most striking gulf is between the ‘hard’ knowledge claimed by engineers and natural scientists and the ‘soft’ knowledge attributed to social scientists who investigate (and occasionally try to manage) company‐community relationships. However, the number of environmental disasters which have been accidentally engineered by the mining industry is partial testament to the disconnection which is also commonly found between the different types of hard knowledge that are applied to mining project design and the assessment of environmental impacts in the design phase of the project cycle. This problem is less acute in the relationship between different types of soft knowledge, and in my experience, social scientists can do a better job of integrating hard and soft forms of knowledge than their counterparts in the ‘hard’ sciences. However, the owners of hard knowledge are commonly unwilling to concede this point, so inter‐disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between the social and environmental impacts of major mining projects often fall by the wayside. These systemic obstacles to the achievement of sustainable community development are also obstacles to the achievement of other forms of corporate social responsibility, and thus reduce the credibility of company reports on such achievements. Furthermore, these systemic problems are all likely to be 9 exaggerated in the midst of a resource boom, and this adds further weight to the argument that mining companies may achieve more good during times when business is bad. Policy planning and implementation In a relatively poor country like PNG, a booming resource sector can create additional obstacles to the achievement of sustainable development outcomes because it detracts from the capacity of government officials to implement policies that would oblige or encourage mining companies to do the right thing. I do not want to say too much about this in the presence of my friend Shadrach Hamata, and I am well aware that members of PNG’s anti‐mining lobby have wrongly blamed public servants for a number of bad political decisions from which they were actually excluded, especially those relating to development of the Ramu nickel mine. Nevertheless, it remains the case that many public servants with relevant expertise have taken up jobs in the mining sector, where they often have much less influence on corporate behavior than they formerly had as government regulators, for the simple reason that they can earn two or three times as much as they did before. This particular from of disconnection or dissociation has been exaggerated by the construction phase of the PNG gas project, because the oil and gas industry pays even higher wages than the hard‐rock mining industry, and the upward pressure which it has exerted on the cost of housing in the national capital has made it even harder for public servants to make ends meet with their low salaries. It is not hard to imagine how this particular aspect of the Dutch Disease will afflict those smaller Pacific island nations that have the fortune or misfortune to participate in the current resource boom. Even if they do not end up with an oil or gas industry, their limited experience of regulating the extractive industry sector means that they have not had the opportunity to develop relevant policies and institutions comparable to those that have been developed in PNG over the last 35 years. So the implementation gap is more like a policy vacuum, and that is even worse if it is true that mining companies have some incentive to comply with government policies and regulations, even in the absence of effective oversight by government officials. And because most Pacific island economies are so small by comparison, it only takes one medium‐sized mining project to distort their labour markets in the same way that the PNG gas project is currently distorting the PNG labour market. This in turn means that individuals who acquire the capacity to formulate and implement new policies to regulate the industry will be sorely tempted to join the industry before they have the chance to make use of this capacity. Regional aid equations Back in 2002, when I was helping the PNG Department of Mining to formulate a sustainable development policy under the terms of a loan from the World Bank, I and other members of our team decided that the policy was unlikely to be implemented properly unless additional funding could be found for this purpose. So we asked an AusAID official whether her agency would be willing to fund the implementation phase. The response was negative, essentially on the grounds that AusAID does not deal with mining matters as a matter of principle. This was understandable, because it was and remains the case that people living in areas directly affected by large‐scale mining operations appear to be a lot 10 better off than people living in other parts of the country. If poverty alleviation is the main aim of development assistance, then it would seem like common sense for an agency like AusAID to focus its efforts on places where people do not have opportunity of having their poverty alleviated by the presence of a mining company. And in any case, given the reputation of the mining industry for causing environmental, social and political disasters in those parts of PNG where it had been operating, the Australian public and their political representatives might not be too happy if their aid agency were to be seen as helping the mining industry to achieve its development objectives. In 2011, AusAID has acquired its own Mining Taskforce, and is preparing to spend millions of dollars on precisely the sort of activities that it refused to countenance nine years ago. The most innocent explanation for this particular paradigm shift is that Australian politicians and public servants have realized that many of the countries to which Australian aid is being directed are in urgent need of additional capacity to regulate a booming resource sector, and have perhaps expressed this need more urgently in their requests for Australian assistance. A more sinister explanation might be derived from Paul Cleary’s observations about the political influence of the mining industry within Australia. After all, if the mining industry has shown that it can get rid of an Australian prime minister, why should it not be able to influence the direction of the Australian aid program? To Pacific island countries that stand to benefit from this new form of Australian aid, Cleary might therefore send a warning to beware of Greeks bearing gifts – a reference to the fate of the Trojans who welcomed a wooden horse into their city, only to find out later that it was full of Greek soldiers who came out and opened the gates of the city in the middle of the night, thus enabling the rest of the Greek army to destroy the whole place. This I think is a flight of fancy. The Australian government has simply accepted a measure of responsibility for dealing with some of the more difficult development problems that it formerly left to the World Bank. But if the World Bank’s experience is anything to go by, it will not be easy to make progress on this front. Conclusion [TO BE WRITTEN ON PLANE]