Creeds and Cultures

Katherine Marshall Closing Remarks

Religion and Development: Past, Present, and Future

In the first half century of its history, the World Bank looked extraordinarily seldom at religion as a factor in development.  One reflection of this blind spot in the Bank’s culture is the voluminous history of the Bank published in 1997[1]:  the detailed index contains only one reference to religion—a 1962 Rome meeting involving the Catholic Church.  The approaches of Islam, Buddhism, other branches of Christianity, and other faiths to development, and their recent engagements with the Bank, received no mention.

This omission reflects the fact that until very recently, analysts have devoted little systematic effort to exploring the role of religion in development and religious frameworks for evaluating economic progress.  The Bank’s research agenda, in particular, has rarely focused explicitly on religious experience or variables. At an institutional level, unspoken assumptions (generally with a negative cast) about the role of religion have tended to dampen discussion of its role: it is telling that one report from long ago about Singapore suggested that its development prospects were dim because its Confucian traditions would stifle entrepreneurial spirit and incentives for economic success. While many Bank staff members have brought insights and contacts with the world of religion to their work, most such engagement has been unheralded and unwritten, and thus outside the Bank’s formal knowledge base. The upshot is that virtually no information or discussion about the relationship between religion and development, as seen by the World Bank, is in the public domain. 

Since early in his tenure as President of the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn has taken an active role in putting the issue of religion on the development agenda.  At the beginning this was a tale of two ships passing in the night. We found that the Bank had little institutional knowledge of religious organizations, few institutional relationships, and almost no knowledge emerging from research.  In this early context, it was as if the Bank used a completely different vocabulary, and we did not know where to look or even the right questions to ask regarding the role of religion in development.  That is one of the reasons why the Creeds and Cultures dialogues are so important.  By exploring the relationship between religion and development, the Bank begins to ask the questions that it and others can explore with more rigor. 

Interestingly, many from the religious world tend to describe the Bank as religious, for what I classify as four broad reasons. First, we are seen to rely on a deep faith in an invisible force: the market.  Second, we tend to preach.  Third, we are viewed as very dogmatic.  Fourth, we are perceived as tempters, holding out the temptation of material goods to draw people to a course of our preferred course of action.  As the Bank has come to know a wider range of religious institutions, our institution has seen itself in a somewhat different light. 

One of the phenomena that I have observed in this predominantly analytical institution is that it rarely treats two subjects, in particular, with the full and sober analytic approach on which we pride ourselves.. The first is gender; it often seems that many, in early discussions of the topic, have not far from their consciousness their own gender relations, whether withmothers or daughters or spouses.  A second is religion, where similarly many approach the topic with their own experience of religion and their views on the topic entering into their response and analysis.  Thus, . We at the Bank are far more prone to approach these two issues with emotion and preconceived ideas than we do in most cases.  In both instances, as the Bank has begun to integrate these issues in mainstream work and analysis, we have had to overcome both our historic ignorance and find effective ways to look to the future with a thoughtful and objective manner.

There is in no way a consensus on how important religion should be for the Bank.  A quote from one recently published work reads:  “For the 21^st century there is no single force that will so shape the history of the world as religion.[2]”  Yet another work describes Mr. Wolfensohn’s support of the World Faiths Development Dialogue [DEFINE HERE?] as a slightly loony idea.   There are certainly countless other views as well.

Four basic arguments suggest why the Bank must bring its multidisciplinary energy, analytic skills, and hands to bear on these issues. First is the substantial role that religious organizations play in providing social services such as education and healthcare.  Especially in the poorest countries, religious organizations are often the only ones left standing in times of conflict.  In many ways religious groups are the ultimate community organization, reflecting most faiths’ deep commitment to social welfare and improving the human condition. 

Second, surveys of public trust often find that people rate religious organizations very high, above governments, and probably above the World Bank and other organizations.  Third, religious organizations have been influential critics as well as advocates of development for the World Bank.  The Jubilee 2000 work on debt relief has been a powerful movement, changing the way millions of people look at poverty and development.  Many powerful religious organizations have also raised their voices decrying corruption and promoting social justice and welfare.  Religion has been critical in shaping attitudes in both rich and poor countries toward the future.

The fourth argument is that in the current debate about globalization, religious organizations often play crucial roles in mobilizing energies and anger, in addition to supporting some of the forces for social and economic change.

These arguments suggest a number of future priorities for the Bank. The greatest imperative is to engage in a wide-ranging and thoughtful dialogue with faith organizations on these points.  From very practical issues such as work on HIV/AIDS to more general debates on globalization, progress, and other thorny notions, religious organizations can help the Bank make better-informed decisions.  

The Bank also needs to know much more intimately what 5 billion people in the developing world are thinking about and care about.  Tens of millions of people are professionally involved with faith, and there are a multitude of faith-based institutions. We need to engage them far more.  We need to understand better the intersections between faith and development because these links are vastly more common than we as an institution realize and have documented.  As an illustration, the Catholic Church alone provides 25 percent of the world’s healthcare, working through more than 111,000 institutions. Yet historically the Bank has not had a dialogue with the Catholic Church about health policy.  Gender issues are tremendously important as well, as are underexplored areas such as the environment—that is, stewardship of the land—and finance.

As a final comment, one of the main criticisms directed at the Bank is that though our technical skills are excellent, we are not good at applying that knowledge on a country level. The Bank invests very little in understanding the way things work within individual countries.  If we are to better understand how countries operate, we need to appreciate their religious complexion.  No diplomatic service would send people to another country without insisting that they do some reading, develop some knowledge, and receive some training in that nation’s cultural, social, and political history and organization. Yet the Bank sends people to countries every day, probably without even a reading list.  Developing a more formal, structured way of understanding each country’s complex, multifaceted landscape—including its religious structures—is a critical element for success in encouraging sustainable development.

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May 1, 2004 8:45 AM