World Bank - On the usefulness of governments


The position of national governments seems the mantra of the ongoing conference and the World Bank displays a modesty that used to be uncommon. The question is whether it is possible to develop new models that can work and upscale proven solutions, the target of the conference.
I attended a panel on water, a very important issue, but did not get wiser. The China example was not very useful because it mainly presented consolidated figures from all over China, and then you cannot learn very much about what works and does not work. An African representative presented all kind of different models, they all worked, so it was hard to draw any conclusions here.
Because most of the non-NGO representatives are working for national governments, I fear that the conclusion will be that government is very important, even in cases where that obviously is not the case, like in Wenzhou.
Colleague Bill Savadove of the South China Morning Post obtained an impressive list of all the Chinese government official that attend this conference: about a dozen pages with names. For jobs, the government is of course extremely important.