Oh, the hours we spent inside the Coliseum,
Dodging lions and wasting time....
from "When I Paint My Masterpiece" by Bob Dylan

A year has come and gone since I traveled to Rome to take part in an early meeting of the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD). If nothing else, I enjoyed the trip, meeting with spiritual activists from numerous faiths, engaging in earnest talk, eating wonderful food, walking the ancient streets, and partaking of a small portion of the international banking system's largesse.

The WFDD has evolved out of a series of meetings in Washington and Great Britain between officials of the World Bank and religious leaders from around the world. The aim of our meeting in Rome and subsequent gatherings (that I followed, but did not attend) has been to shape a definition of poverty and development that includes spiritual values, to offer a faith-based vision to the World Development Report 2000 (WDR), and to help redefine the Bank's work. Our Think Sangha brother David Loy also participated in this process. The opinions below are my own. David may well have a different perspective.

In Rome we spent two days discussing the nature of poverty, in fact, the varieties of poverty. My own perspective, the first noble truth of poverty, follows a definition offered at the meeting by Bishop Diarmuid Martin of the Pontifical Council for Justice & Peace: Poverty is the inability of people to realize their potential. I would expand that to include the inability to control the circumstances of life, circumstances built on the four requisites: food, shelter, clothing, medicine. These are requisites for following any spiritual path and for living a life that leads to freedom and self-determination. In Rome Swami Amarananda reminded us, "Religion is not for empty bellies." Nor, I think, is any other kind of socially productive life.

Less commonly held, and not at all spoken in Rome or at any of the other WFDD gatherings, is a second noble truth of poverty. The cause of poverty is a systematic clinging to material wealth, manifesting primarily (though not exclusively) as the now global corporate capitalist system. The World Bank, along with the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and various transnational private and pseudo-public institutions are integral to that cause.

So, on to the third and fourth noble truths of poverty - and here is where my thinking before and after this meeting needs to go further: Is there really a path of liberation from poverty, and what are the nuts and bolts stages of that path? How do we prioritize resources so they go first to the desperately poor, like those people I have seen in Bangladesh or on the Thai-Burma Border? In relation to the World Bank, can we actually transform the Bank's inverted process of poverty creation, or is the presence of faiths representatives simply window dressing, helping the Bank to look good and feel good about itself? This has been the concern of many of us. The influence of James Wolfensohn, present Bank president, the assumption of many of the Bank's customary responsibilities by private industry, and the ongoing attempt to wrestle with realities of abject poverty have pointed to a possibility of change. On the other hand, economic modeling, and a deeply entrenched career management level at the Bank make change difficult. And more deeply, as Paul Francis and other Think Sangha friends have commented, "We have to remember that the Bank is still a bank." That is, even though it has much greater policy flexibility than conventional banks, its loans must still be repaid with interest. If it fails in that mission, then the World Bank will soon find itself without funds to lend out.

Back in December of 1998, I offered four suggestions for the WFDD's work:

1. Urge the World Bank to support and involve itself in the creation of non-standard indicators that are co-created by poor people themselves, in hope that such new indicators might speak to the Bank's economists and policy makers in ways that are compelling and intelligible in their intellectual language.

2. Similarly, the Bank could commit itself to processes for fully including the people most affected in the evaluation of all projects in developing countries. True inclusion is empowerment, going beyond the circles of government officials and engineers. This leads to real accountability - to lenders, to borrowers, and to the poor themselves. It is also risky in two dimensions. First, there is always the risk that empowerment will create new privileged groups. Second, real empowerment might threaten the institution itself, removing power from the hands of those individuals and nations that hold it now.

3. Put debt reduction high on our agenda. In the heavily indebted nations, home to a large portion of the world's six billion people, the poor are triple burdened by an enormous debt service, lack of social services, and absence of benefits that might have come from failed Bank projects. This is a focal point that others in WFDD (and in Think Sangha) do not agree with as our agenda. They point out there are many other organizations advocating debt relief. WFDD's mission should be to raise wider concerns about Bank policy and methods. But I can't see how the issue of debt can be set apart from any central questioning about poverty.

4. And this was my main suggestion. WFDD could organize an ongoing process of retreats or councils, real dialogue, where all parties to the World Bank's work - borrowers, lenders, local people, economists, engineers, and people of faith - can meet each other as individuals, with all the joys, sorrows, gifts, needs, and suffering that mark our human lives, and come to a better understanding of the systems we function within. This, I think, is a Buddhist approach - deep listening as to a social action path, part of the fourth noble truth of poverty.

Well, those were naive suggestions, rooted, perhaps, in my own perhaps willful misunderstanding of the word "dialogue" in "World Faiths Development Dialogue." I felt, then and now, that revisions in the World Development Report, no matter how right-on would have no real impact on the Bank's action. That was WFDD's main agenda for now, which I didn't quite understand. I still can't really accept it.

It was disappointing, too, that beyond the meeting in Rome, which truly was collegial and interesting, I have found little dialogue within the group. The postings and comments I sent out by e-mail to all were only answered by the compassionate, dedicated, and overworked WFDD coordinator Wendy Tyndale. There was not the kind of give and take, rubbing and polishing that I see as essential to a lively intellectual process. Meeting notes, articles, comments seem to have been funneled to the few people assigned to drafting our response to the WDR. And further meetings, like this November's Washington WFDD gathering of church leaders with Bank president and the Archbishop of Canterbury, come off without any notification to others of us who have earlier been involved in the process. In that sense, our own workings have mirrored the Bank's wondrous ability to create hierarchies of privilege and to crunch numbers and ideas.

So, can we really make a change in the vision and function of the World Bank? I would have to say, no, not this way. And can the Bank fulfill its high-minded mission - "A World Free of Poverty" - and still be a bank? Again, no. Something new is needed. New thinking, entirely outside the box of development. With years of Buddhist practice behind me, it is challenging to face the anger that comes up for me each time I just hear the word "development", a word that generally means the very opposite of what it connotes.

Last month I was speaking with a friend who directs a watchdog organization that tracks nuclear weapons design, proliferation, and production work at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory. He described various dialogues initiated by the lab in recent years. Dialogues on the environment, on economic issues, on security, all consciously or unconsciously serving to deflect attention and grassroots organizing from the central issues of nuclear weapons and political power. Some of these efforts were led by good, sincere people at the lab, not simply calculating manipulators. The lab powers that be, though went even further, luring board member's of my friend's organization with well paid positions and interesting projects. As he related this, I couldn't help thinking about parallels to the WFDD process.

But interesting and encouraging things are happening nonetheless. Last June a massive lobbying effort convinced the World Bank to delay funding and implementation of controversial plan (part of the China Western Poverty Reduction Project) to resettle Chinese and Muslim farmers on the Tibetan Plateau. Novelist Arundhati Roy's essay, "For The Greater Common Good", is alerting the world to the depredations of the Bank-financed Narmada River Dam in India. In the middle of November, against long political odds, a coalition of Episcopal, Catholic, and Protestant churches successfully pushed the U.S. Congress to support a package of IMF debt relief for poor countries, an effort that will likely leverage much more extensive debt relief from the G7 lenders to IMF.

The dust has not settled at the 1999 round of World Trade Organization talks in Seattle. This globalization summit was met by activists with an intense and well-planned protest effort that veered into violence. While I felt dismayed at the police violence in Seattle, and at the anger and vandalism of what the media chooses to call "anarchist thugs", the structural violence of the WTO, the World Bank, IMF, etc. is incalculably more destructive of life and freedom than the street-fighting. In a way, I find the protests, particularly the massive nonviolent protest in Seattle, deeply encouraging. That this degree of awareness and motivation focuses on a pivotal mechanism of global capitalism means people are coming to a broader and clearer awareness of how things really work.

So there is good news afoot, and it is based on grassroots organizing, not high-minded rhetoric. If we truly want to reduce poverty we need to be allies to the poor, give space to their voices and demands. Let's invite them to our cathedrals, temples, and high-rise meeting rooms. Then the fun begins.

Alan Senauke is a Soto Zen priest and a resident teacher at the Berkeley Zen Center. He is also Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and on the INEB Executive Committee.