Faith and Development: Rethinking Development Debates

Faith and Development: Rethinking Development Debates [1]

Katherine Marshall, the World Bank

June, 2005

Some maintain that religion and socio economic development belong to different spheres and are best cast in separate roles—even separate dramas. However, the wide array of faith institutions and development agencies across the world share a central focus on poor people, concern about patterns of social exclusion, and a searing disappointment in the face of unfulfilled human potential. This common ground ties both communities to the global consensus underlying the 2000 Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals—the centerpiece of the 2000 United Nations Summit—and opens opportunities even as it poses practical challenges.[2]

The April 2005 conference in Oslo, on roles of religious NGOs in development work, was testimony to a growing appreciation of the many links and areas of common concern between seemingly separate and contending worlds.  We live in dangerous times, with dangerous roads ahead, and such roads are best traveled together by those whose direction and path are essentially the same. We also live in a world with phenomenal opportunities, where the ancient assumption that “the poor shall always be with us” can and must be disproved.   This demands urgent new thinking and action by different partners as it casts quite new light on ancient approaches, assumptions and roles.  Thus the Oslo focus on the many holes in knowledge and awareness of work across different silos of action against poverty has special importance, perhaps none with more immediate challenges and relevance than the areas where the worlds of religion and development overlap.

This story is based on my lived experience of how one institution, the World Bank, has engaged over the past seven years with the world of faith.  This journey has been far from smooth but it has involved much learning and new understandings of both development and of partnerships.  The experience thus suggests many lessons for the global challenges of linking faith and development work more effectively. As we build stronger bridges between the realms of faith and development—avoiding dangers, not always as fellows but at least as fellow travelers—we need to deal with forthright honesty about our differences even as we bring to life the shared dream of a world without poverty.

The World Bank and Religion?

In view of the many differing conceptions of the role of the World Bank, we should start with a sense of our role, as I see it. This vision of the institution’s mission and character underpins why we have set out to build greater understanding of and stronger ties to faith institutions. At the front door of the World Bank’s main building, engraved in marble, is the phrase “Our dream is a world free of poverty.” That mission unites many who work in widely differing areas and may see very different paths and priorities in aiming for a poverty-free world. The World Bank of today is also marked by a widening appreciation that the task of working for a more just world must enlist a range of interventions and actors, and that there is no magic bullet, no single recipe. A kaleidoscope of partnerships and a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach are vital if we are to attain our dreams.

As front-line operational officers and international civil servants in a multilateral institution, in our World Bank work we address issues from AIDS to zebras, one might say. Debt, corruption, gender issues, and environmental assessments are our hourly fare. We work with villagers to raise crop yields, build pumps for water, and reduce maternal mortality. We work with urban slum communities on housing, with city administrators on sanitation, and with women’s groups to confront the HIV/AIDS pandemic, expand promising microcredit schemes, and improve child nutrition. Education is a central concern, as are jobs and social safety nets. We deal all too often with the impacts of economic crises and mismanagement (including corruption, which siphons resources away from social services and development programs). Technology, trade, public institutions, and land rights affect these programs in many ways. We aim always to forge long-term visions and solutions that will yield better lives, even as we grapple daily with the practical consequences of strategic choices for countries as different as Bolivia, Mali, Morocco, Turkey, South Africa and Cambodia. We are pragmatic visionaries and idealistic realists.  A central part of our ethos is to serve as a catalyst and to help bring the best of global experience to those who want and need to change.

Though this list of topics and issues around development is familiar to any faith-based NGO, church, or imam working in a poor community, the World Bank, over its 60-year history, had remarkably little professional contact at either global or local levels with the world of faith and the people who work in it. Faith perspectives—including the active roles of religious institutions that own land, run schools, assist poor people, and care for orphans and disabled people—were often invisible to development teams. That oversight often resulted from preconceptions about differing roles, although it sometimes reflected suspicions that faith institutions stood against development goals. Project analysis and documentation, institutional vocabulary, research agendas, dialogue with countries, public speeches, and internal staff training rarely included glimpses of the world of faith. Even today the World Bank website hardly mentions faith. Some encounters with churches, temples, and mosques did occur, but these interactions were driven by specific individuals and proved patchy and ephemeral.

I could draw a similar portrait of the perspective among many faith-based institutions regarding development institutions.  The former have often painted a rather dismal picture of the latter as large, difficult to understand, arrogant, driven by an agenda to create—and even concentrate—wealth, and removed from daily concerns. Faith groups often portray development institutions as contributing to social and economic problems because of their advice to curtail subsidies, introduce or enforce taxation regimes, constrain civil service employment, work towards efficiency in expenditures on schools and health, and reduce barriers that protect crop production or local industry.[3] Tensions have mounted highest regarding the World Bank’s advice to governments in handling their finances, including large debt, economic crises, and extensive and often poorly managed public sectors. As an example, faith groups have also seen privatization of water systems as detrimental to the poor; World Bank teams, in contrast, have regarded such measures as the best—if not the only—way to attract investment and provide clean water at reasonable cost to all.

This discussion of disconnects is not about the potential for directing development funding for development programs to faith institutions (a quite common misconception as to what the discussion is about).  Its focus is on the policy arena and questions about visions and strategies that underlie development programs. Putting funding at the forefront of this analysis would overstate its role both in the concerns of faith institutions about multilateral development policies and in the World Bank’s array of instruments in fighting poverty, where policy and institutions come at the top of the hierarchy of importance. A focus on money might suggest that a primary goal of development work is to transfer funds. In fact, most faith institutions are not seeking direct financing from development institutions, and the World Bank would have little to no capacity to finance faith institutions directly even if it sought to do so. There is a large scope for dialogue, partnership, alliances, and mutual support and exchange outside the confines of a focus on direct finance.

The issue of how the World Bank relates to civil society, including in this instance faith institutions, is an important and long-standing area of concern.  The Bank is an institution that is profoundly respectful of its relations with the governments that are its shareholders; we work in a partnership with them to determine how to structure loans, credits, and grants and who will implement programs.  The primacy of the World Bank’s relationships with governments attracts considerable attention, particularly in countries where democratic institutions and traditions are not well developed, but even in countries with vibrant public debate.  The World Bank of the past in fact felt highly constrained in its relations with most entities outside governments, relating to them through the lens of government guidance.  Meetings with civil society were in many countries rare and often stilted.  This situation has, however, changed markedly in recent years and in practice today the World Bank has a myriad of partnerships and relationships with an extraordinary range of institutions.  Among the most dynamic are those with civil society organizations.  What remains true, though, is that financing relationships for normal Bank business are the province of governments which decide when and for what purpose they will borrow or accept grants and how the programs will be executed.

Many forces other than funding have shaped the jarring perceptions and realities that divide faith and development institutions. Among the most important is a tendency to work in distinct silos and sectors.  Thus faith institutions often do not find a “fit” in consultative processes, because such processes tend to center on government entities which may not instinctively or deliberately include faith voices.  Development institutions have few vehicles that help them to navigate among faith institutions and learn from them, as they organize their work as well as their discourse in a quite different fashion and may be quite ignorant of the faith worlds. This segmentation has contributed to significant tension among players who share a deep concern for the welfare of the world’s poorest citizens and its social, political, and environmental systems. It would be naïve not to recognize that some of the segmentation is fueled by a human tendency towards competition and a focus on one’s own institution, even in ventures whose aims are profoundly altruistic and cooperative.  But the importance of differing histories, organization, approach and language would seem far greater.

The long-standing tendency by the World Bank to employ dry, technical economics-speak contributes to an aura of exclusiveness. The Bank recognizes that accessible language is critical for the public engagement that underlies development success, but does not always put that precept into practice. World Bank circles also rarely use the language of ethics and values—of spirituality and the soul, which faith institutions quite understandably expect to hear.   This exacerbates misperceptions: development institutions are profoundly ethical in their origins, the passion of their staffs, and the rules governing financial management, procurement and project evaluation, among other aspects of their work. But that is difficult to divine from institutional prose, which tends to be data-laden and "preachy” in the certainty of tone and tendency to prescribe. 

Finally, there are the perception and the reality of the “balance of power” among institutions. Faith institutions often describe a David-and-Goliath situation, wherein the mighty World Bank evinces little regard for poor governments facing the Damocles sword of acute fiscal crisis with limited resources and voice, and for smaller institutions and actors (although the reverse might occur with a powerful institution such as the Vatican). Such perceptions clearly play a role in how relationships between faith and development groups take shape.

Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, pursued significant efforts to bridge these divides.  His outreach drew in civil society, business, and cultural institutions, but the attempt to build links with communities of faith was among the most important and ambitious. These efforts included high-level meetings among faith and development leaders with the aim of building a global alliance buttressed by policy consultations, a focused effort to build bridges on HIV/AIDS programs, and country level pilots to test the waters of joint approaches to leading development issues.

One result is the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), an small, autonomous institution which engages in dialogue and action on poverty, culture and diversity, services to the poor, and equity.[4] For example, the WFDD has examined the view and involvement of faith institutions in the Poverty Reduction Strategy process (PRSP), which links debt relief to strategies for alleviating poverty. The WFDD has also piloted interfaith explorations of development issues in Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Tanzania, and engaged faith groups in programs to combat HIV/AIDS and preserve the environment. The Bank also has a small team (which I lead) devoted to relationships with faith institutions, that works in tandem with WFDD.

A series of global meetings between faith and development leaders helped shape this agenda for action. At the first such meeting, held at Lambeth Palace in London in February 1998, a small group of leaders from the major world faiths met under the leadership of Jim Wolfensohn and George Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, with His Highness the Aga Khan also present. Participants concluded that shared concerns about poverty were far more important than their evident differences. A second meeting, held in Washington DC, in November 1999, concluded with an action plan for creating the WFDD. A larger group of leaders then met at Camterbury in October 2002 to link their dialogue to the Millennium Development Goals(MDGs).[5] The most recent meeting, held at Dublin Castle in January 2005, chaired again by Jim Wolfensohn and Lord Carey with Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, reaffirmed the vital importance of faith-development dialogue and action for the MDG agenda, and for working beyond them towards global equity.[6]

A growing network of supporters saw these efforts as offering significant potential for enhancing development work. In 2000, however, the overall initiative inspired by Jim Wolfensohn encountered serious opposition from the World Bank’s executive directors—representatives of its 184 member countries. These objections prompted the Bank to curtail its level of effort and change the form of its engagement with faith institutions to one that was more cautious, more muted, and more qualified than was originally foreseen.

Dialogue within the Bank and discussions with member governments since the 2000 discussions have highlighted the reasons why the faith development dialogue makes eminent sense and addressed many of the concerns that had been raised. And September 11, 2001, shone a spotlight on the importance of religion in global affairs, removing a veil from realities that had been present all along.  Still, the Bank never fully resolved its internal tensions and criticisms, and they impeded development of the WFDD. The work has continued nonetheless; today faith organizations participate in the work of the World Bank at many levels, including a newly launched Civil Society Forum, efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, and community approaches to the environment. Awareness of the importance of faith roles is embedded in some Bank operations. Nevertheless, the reach and depth of understanding is still patchy and fragile and uncertainties regarding future directions persist. An internal stocktaking of relations with faith institutions—particularly at the international level—is likely to occur following the presidential transition in June 2005.

Why Engage with Faith Institutions?  Arguments against and Lessons Learned

            Noone has argued at any stage that if a government chooses to engage with faith institutions, the World Bank and other development institutions cannot appropriately follow suit. Development institutions have also regarded faith groups as legitimate and important players in civil society forums on the full gamut of development issues. However, critics have raised questions about joint action involving faith institutions directly (for example on education) and even dialogue that takes place at the global or regional level. These concerns fall into three categories: the politics surrounding religion; the views of some religious institutions of development and their influence on it; and questions about whether a systematic dialogue with faith institutions is a priority or even relevant. In a simple if somewhat caricatured summary, development critics see religions as divisive, dangerous, and defunct.

Religion is divisive: The World Bank operates under a strict injunction to avoid political interference in the affairs of member countries and questions were raised as to whether engagement with global interfaith and faith organizations might run up against that injunction given the many tensions that have characterized relationships among faith groups over history. Bank engagement with leading faith figures and in global debates involving faith communities also was seen to threaten an age-old and often hard-won separation between church and state (the laicité defended so keenly by France, in particular). Critics also expressed concern that work with faith groups might draw the World Bank into forces underlying fundamentalist movements. Where religion contributes to civic tensions and conflicts, Bank involvement might accentuate these tensions and even promote violence.

Religious politics can be ferociously complex and often ferocious. Competition between faith systems seems hard-wired, given the ultimate stakes (who is saved) and shorter-term stakes (like financial survival). Veils of polite rhetoric and solemn ritual can merely mask intolerance in many instances. Yet the vast majority of people of faith live in harmony and the array of interfaith initiatives and institutions in today’s world is extraordinary.  Thus the legal and social norms guiding separation of church and state reflect both wisdom and hard politics. Yet the development world often holds highly simplified views of how religions work, and of the enormous numbers and wide differences among faith institutions and practices.  Simply saying that “church” and “state” are separate is often impractical, unrealistic, unnecessary, and unwise. 

Religion is dangerous: Dialogue about faith-development relationships has brought into stark relief the fact that deep down if often unspoken many development actors see many religions as working toward a fundamentally different agenda, one driven by tradition and immutable theological approaches.  These, they argue, lead faith leaders and institutions to stand against modernization and social change in general, and to oppose change and flexibility in the roles of women and men in particular, especially where reproductive health is concerned. Many development workers are concerned that faith institutions—even if they focus on health and education—serve a limited segment of the community to the exclusion of non-followers, and are primarily motivated by a desire to gain converts.

Culture and motivation are complicating factors.  Many cultural practices have a religious veneer, and vice versa, but disentangling the strands of culture and religion is difficult, the more so as both strands (culture and faith) change—often at different tempos.  Female genital mutilation is perhaps the most striking example of a tightly knotted set of issues but there are countless others.  There is also suspicion (often going many ways) turning on motives for action.  Some development actors have been reluctant to engage with faith institutions even in the area of classic social services like health and education where they are large and important players and programs overlap, because of a concern that the work of faith institutions, however effective, is primarily motivated by a desire to gain converts or to serve a limited segment of the community.  That faith groups often serve the whole community without quid pro quos is often either not known or put aside.  The concerns about motives and exclusion are exacerbated by real frictions linked to the evangelizing or proselytizing activities of some faiths, with which development actors wish not to be associated in any fashion. 

The upshot of this complex of issues and concerns was that some argued that it was best not to engage at all with institutions whose agendas were so fundamentally opposed to important areas of consensus and priority in the development community and where the issues at stake (role of women, ancient traditions and rituals, sexuality) were so profoundly sensitive and difficult to discuss.

Religion is defunct. An often unspoken assumption among many development institutions is that adherence to religion declines with modernization and economic growth. As society becomes increasingly modern and secular, religion is viewed as peripheral and even retrograde.  Engagement with faith institutions is thus seen as unnecessary and a low priority.

Each of these areas of doubt poses important questions and highlights areas of risk that deserve to be addressed. Indeed, dialogue on their implications has proved both sobering and enlightening, suggesting more sophisticated ways to approach the issues. What follows are some preliminary conclusions and “lessons”:

* Respect for country norms regarding the roles of church and state needs to be grounded in an understanding of history and socio-political debates country by country and even community by community, avoiding presuppositions and “models”.  Very different formulas are emerging today in different places and one size does not fit all. In France, for example, centuries of religious wars shape contemporary approaches to immigrant communities and religious symbolism in schools.  Debates about accountability, governance and change in many Muslim societies are colored by national and society narratives of historical evolution and distinct features of communities.  India’s creative models of building on social and faith traditions and institutions in the domain of personal law, within the bounds of basic rights, appears to work well.  Morocco’s path-breaking new family code brings ancient faith traditions and modern realities and concepts of rights together in a creative new pattern.

* The debates about the evolving boundaries between church and state, that can rage both in villages and in the United Nations, have implications for development programs from the macro level (whose voice determines national and transnational politics?) to the most micro level (village political structure and voice, approaches to civic and religious education in schools).

* These profoundly complex and sensitive issues, their roots going far back in history, enjoin us to great care and humility.  Among the most practical and difficult challenges is in determining whose voice to listen to; who, of the host of possible choices, should be invited to participate in a dialogue?  It is patently impossible to hear all voices, and there should be no pretence of doing so.   Groups such as Religions for Peace and the World Parliament of the Religions have invested decades in developing the understanding and consensus that enables them to aspire to inclusiveneness and representativity (as they term it).  Most important is to make no claims to all inclusiveness and to be prepared at all times to hear new voices.

* We need to engage (with open eyes and appropriate caution) with groups even when they are controversial and work to establish an environment where it is understood that the objective is to listen, not to judge, to understand, not to preach.  This is because it is so important to reach beyond the circles of the “converted”, who are part of global networks and institutions in the interfaith world, to those who are at the boundaries of tensions and conflicts.  We need to appreciate better these perspectives; also, herein lies potential for helping to advance dialogue and work towards solutions.  That said, development practitioners must avoid associating with advocates of violence or bitter critics of other faiths.

* We can learn much by engaging with interfaith institutions and events.  The core goals (world peace and harmonious relations among peoples) could scarcely be more important or admirable.  This world works not towards superficial harmony but towards a genuine transformation in attitudes and practices springing from new understandings of interfaith realities and potential avenues for living and working together with respect and understanding.  These are essential for a globalized, increasingly plural society.  There is also a large area of practical ground for exchange and direct inputs in this realm of interfaith dialogue as it touches a wide range of development issues (witness the World Parliament of the Religions core agenda in 2004: debt, water, refugees, and religiously-motivated violence; the Community of Sant'Egidio focus on HIV/AIDS).

* The development world needs a well-informed appreciation of two key elements in the politics of religion. First, deep traditions underlie theological differences, and these should never be minimized.  That said, a host of deeply rooted efforts are working to build respect for those differences and bridge them. This is a very dynamic area.  Sulak Sivaraksa, a wise Buddhist leader, at a recent meeting commented that the theologians of today are increasingly open and flexible, and it is the economists who now are the least flexible and least understanding of other realities.  Unexpected synergies and alliance quite often can occur.  Recent alliances among very different faith traditions in the United States to fight against trafficking of women and advocate for sharply increased support for HIV/AIDS programs illustrate common ground among unlikely allies.  Second, most religious communities live side by side in harmony and respect. India, for example, is marked by a high degree of religious coexistence despite outbreaks of violence. Africa, too, is a profoundly religiously pluralistic continent largely marked by amicable relations among communities. “Faith literacy” needs to move beyond stereotypes and a veneer of passing reference to faith to more sophisticated understanding.

* We need to remember that despite the large areas of common ground the "religious agenda" is not the same as the "development agenda."  Religions are not, as Archbishop Anastasios of Albania reminded us in one dialogue, "just other NGOs."  There are many cases where it is important to recognize differences and to "agree to disagree". 

* Different agendas, different visions, different vocabulary and different fields of action offer a wealth of possible insight which can be of direct benefit for development programs.  It calls for a willingness both to learn and accept difference and to avoid the "easy path" of focusing on the "easy issues" and rather facile and superficial agreements that poverty is bad.  The "search for common ground" has come a long way, with much consensus on principles of a global ethic and many examples of practical areas where there is agreement among religions.  In important respects, though, it is the apparent differences that are most important to reflect upon - how is globalization experienced?  Why the focus on water?  Why such different views on roles of men and women?  What avenues are suggested on both national and personal indebtedness?  What do faith perspectives suggest on the future agenda for equity?  Reaching beyond the universally accepted to those who are at the boundaries of tensions and conflicts is also important, as is understanding that the objective is to listen, not to judge; to understand, not to preach.

  * The "liberal assumption" that religion will decline as incomes rise is a gross oversimplification; religion is patently not dying out.  Defeating this assumption will require data and evidence.  The assumptions of individuals and institutions regarding faith groups often reflect personal experience: someone with a personal atheist code, or with bitter personal experience with the Catholic or Muslim faith, may approach religion very differently from someone who finds insight and consolation in a faith-based congregation.

* The dynamics of change in religion reflect increasingly pluralistic societies and the potential for more personal religious practice ("briccolage," or combining beliefs in personal ways). More attention to the changing geography and demography of religion can shed light on perceptions of development and, at a much deeper level, help in understanding how societies change and modernize or fail to do so.  Religion and human behavior are tightly associated in most societies in the world.

* Different agendas, visions, vocabulary, and fields of action among faith groups offer a wealth of possible insight from which development programs can benefit directly. What can development institutions learn from movements whose agendas overlap ours? How do faith groups experience globalization? What do faith perspectives suggest about equity and national and personal indebtedness? Why do they hold such different views of roles of men and women? How can we reach those who feel excluded from the benefits of modernization? Religious media also offer vast and powerful channels of communication and there is much we can learn from how they communicate.

* We should invest in case studies of instructive partnerships to address questions about priorities and operational impact. Closer bonds between development agencies and religious communities will probably reflect specific religious and cultural situations.

Making Faith-Development Partnerships a Priority

            The World Bank has focused on a faith-development dialogue for five main reasons. Faith organizations have earned high levels of community trust. Faith institutions also work directly on development, most significantly in education, the environment, and health. Faith institutions not only fuel many conflicts but also work through a myriad of peace-making channels, sustaining communities and spearheading the rebuilding and healing process. They often promote links among communities across national boundaries.  Faith institutions also spur people to grapple with ethical issues ranging from corruption to equity. And they promote public support for development assistance, and help forge consensus around hard choices.

Presence and trust. Faith organizations play major roles in communities and together constitute the world’s largest distribution system. Poor communities around the world also trust faith leaders and institutions more than many other entities.[7]  Given their centuries of engagement in many dimensions of people’s lives, development groups need to hear the views of faith-based groups and draw lessons from their experience. Religions also give hope and bring meaning to the lives of millions of people, and vast religious teachings on core values are essential to human relationships.

Active engagement in development. Some see faith as primarily about Sunday, Friday, Saturday—days set aside for worship—or funerals, marriage, baptism, and other rituals. The practical roles of religions, however, extend far beyond these pastoral activities, important as they are.  We do not know precisely how many hospitals and schools faith institutions operate, how many hectares of forests and watersheds they protect, or how many orphans they care for. However, the numbers are large; some estimates put the share of faith run hospitals in Africa at over 50 percent.  Given the primary focus of the MDGs and development agendas on health and education, dialogue and common engagement seems critical in all these areas.  The HIV/AIDS pandemic has particular importance. Faith institutions, leaders, and communities play major roles in both accentuating and defeating stigma—a primary vector of the disease—and are vital to devising viable strategies to combat it.

Conflict resolution, prevention, and humanitarian support.  In many conflict-affected countries and regions, faith institutions are often the only surviving institutions. They run schools and hospitals even when bullets are flying and when all that is left is rubble.  They rebuild after calamities; witness their key role after the December 2004 tsunami. Whether individually or as part of interfaith alliances, faith communities also constantly engage in peace-making activities, and their voice, consolation, and moral leadership promote healing.

Ethics and values.  Faith institutions and leaders often stand as courageous leaders who “speak truth to power” and help with difficult moral transitions. Witness the role of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in fighting apartheid in South Africa, and of faith groups in confronting child soldiers, trafficked girls, female genital cutting, persecution of witches, and oppression of excluded groups. Thinking deeply about such issues is central to the calling of religious leaders, and they rely on centuries-old traditions to do so. 

Global support for development agendas. Through alliances with faith communities, development leaders stand to benefit greatly from faith leadership, communication skills, and commitment to fighting poverty.  Faith leadership drove the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which relied on an ancient Biblical concept to mobilize a coalition of mothers, students, unions, business, and congregations to reorient a highly technical debate about poor country debt toward social justice.  Such moral and conceptual leadership will be essential in implementing the MDGs and a broader social justice agenda.

At its heart, the arguments for engaging in an active dialogue between institutions of faith and development turn around the growing appreciation that there are enormous areas of overlap, convergence, shared concern and knowledge, and a core common purpose.  Both faith and development institutions seek to work WITH poor communities to improve their lives and ensure them a better future. There is also growing awareness of the critical challenges at the global level, which demand our common alliance and efforts.  Among our common passions and challenges is the determination to focus on Africa and recommit us to this special and remarkable continent.  At the broadest level, and with the metaphor of a common journey in mind, we face a complex and dangerous road ahead in world affairs, and we need to travel it, where we can, together.

Dialogue and alliance are far from easy.  Development circles often confuse dialogue with debate, which involves marshalling and explaining facts and hypotheses, scoring points, and even preaching.  However, we can learn from ancient processes engrained in faith traditions, where dialogue means remaining open to learning and transformation. These traditions and that spirit will be especially important in addressing contentious areas such as gender roles, sexual ethics, contrasting visions of globalization, and approaches to global warming.

Critiques by religious leaders and institutions of the World Bank and other development institutions have helped awaken them to new ways of seeing problems and programs. The Internet and burgeoning civil society have facilitated extraordinary exchanges. We are, nonetheless, at an early stage of dialogue and common engagement.  While the Jubilee campaign helped change in policy and approach to poor countries, unanswered questions remain about how much debt to reschedule and forgive, and the implications of such adjustments for future financing. Faith institutions have also promoted negative images of structural adjustment, globalization and free markets, privatization, user fees, and cash crop projects, among other knotty topics. Participants in faith-development dialogue have advanced beyond mutual condemnation and misunderstanding to an emerging appreciation of why such different understandings of these policies and approaches have taken hold.

At the Dublin meeting of faith and development leaders in early 2005, the community spoke of a covenant for action, and this global partnership of leaders from different sectors expressed the fervent hope that concerted efforts could bring real results for poor communities around the world.  In the words of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, “Development is about real people, people in concrete situations; they possess one great asset, their dignity.”

With many colleagues in the development community, I am hopeful that many recent partnerships can make real the common interest in fighting poverty, protecting the environment, and building on plural cultures within global ethics and values. These efforts include the explorations of poverty and culture led by the WFDD; work on HIV/AIDS by Religions for Peace, Christian Aid, and CARITAS; the two-year dialogue on economic models for development involving the World Council of Churches, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; determined work across continents and faiths by Islamic Relief; and the work of the Alliance of Religions for Conservation.

Strategies for Change: New Partnerships of Mind, Heart, Soul, and Hands

Where there is strong agreement between faith and development institutions is that humanity’s most critical challenge is to end acute poverty and fight for social justice.  Poverty in the world today is an outrage, not only because of the misery it causes but because we so clearly have the means to defeat it.  From ancient times, wise religious leaders have taught compassion and love, have seen the faces of poor people, and have heard their voices (even when they were silent).  Faith institutions have a wealth of experience, an array of instruments, infinite compassion and love, and a community of believers.

The good news is that for perhaps the first time in human history a powerful consensus unites the global community that we can and must ensure that all people, everywhere enjoy a minimally decent standard of living.  The Millennium Development Goals challenge the global community to overcome the scourge of poverty, based on a covenant that involves trade reforms, more development assistance, honest use of development funds, and better governance, including citizens’ participation in determining their own destinies.  As Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, says, “There is no place to hide” because everyone has clearly agreed to tackle poverty. 

Despite this positive framework, progress is not encouraging, as many time-bound targets are not on track.  Recent reports from the U.N. Secretary General, the World Bank, Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and others show a mixed picture and far still to go. The reasons include competing priorities among major leaders and countries (terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq, humanitarian crises), and a failure to capture the imagination of many citizens. The U.N. Summit of Leaders in September 2005 aims to reenergize support for the MDGs, and faith leaders can bring special insight and conviction to the ethical dimensions of this challenge.

An important challenge is to build a new kaleidoscope of alliances and partnerships with faith-based organizations.  This effort needs to build on two major lessons we can draw from our recent history: the problems we face in today’s troubled world are complex, and the motivations of human beings and institutions are far more intricate that we often imagine.  This means—in terms of the challenge of engaging the potential of faith communities—that we, all of us, need to see this as our common fight, with us working as allies.  We need to address both our different views and perspectives.  Only then can we achieve the potential in which we have so much faith.

In the battle ahead, we need to combine mind, heart, soul and hands.

Poverty is an outrage not only because of the misery it causes, but because we so clearly have the means to defeat it.  From ancient times, wise religious leaders have taught compassion and love, have seen the faces of poor people, and have heard their voices even when they were silent.  Faith institutions offer a wealth of experience, an array of instruments, infinite compassion and love, and a community of believers.

A first step is to learn from the rich experience offered by existing faith-development partnerships. Mind, Heart, and Soul in the Fight against Poverty[8] provides such lessons and ideas for further alliances based on stories across the faith and development worlds. Examples include creative efforts in the fight against HIV-AIDS, education, health, community development, conflict resolution, and dialogue across wide divides, including proponents and critics of globalization. 

An important challenge for development institutions is to create new alliances with faith-based organizations. At the risk of oversimplification, four dimensions are essential to the success of such partnerships: mind, heart, soul, and hands. 

First, we need to look facts in the face and use them to clarify and learn.  This intellectual dimension of our challenge entails its own dangers, including intellectual arrogance, bogs of complexity, and cylindrical divisions among professions such as economics and business. Development leaders need to avoid the temptation to blindly follow conventional wisdom and theory, while faith leaders need to think through how ancient sources of wisdom apply to the modern world. 

Second, the mind is not enough: no human endeavor can succeed without caring and compassion for those who face destitution.  Of course, a focus on charity alone can lead us astray, and an emphasis on misery can lead to despair, fatalism, and romanticizing the past—perhaps the worst enemies of the heart.  We need to retain the human face as an image and a sense of caring as we try to solve every technical problem. We need, even in moments of crisis, to keep the causes front and center even while we help our brothers and sisters. We need to focus on relationships built on respect as well as trust. Development institutions and faith institutions alike need wise hearts.

Third, we cannot fight poverty without tending to people’s spiritual dimension and its many manifestations in religious institutions, leaders, and movements.  A focus on the soul can give us the wisdom to reflect more deeply on what we are trying to achieve.  Soul also gives hope and meaning to daily actions and struggles, and unites faith and development communities. We need to beware of false certainty, exclusiveness, and overabstraction in the face of real problems, such as the suffering of women and children. But without this dimension, our work can be arid.  The call to consider soul is a call to courage, integrity, and a sense of stewardship.

Lastly, we live in times rich with rhetoric, yet too many critical aspects of human life suffer from an immense gap between rhetoric and reality. This is perhaps the most significant challenge we face: to translate our words and commitments into sustained action in the face of difficulties and competing priorities. We need to bring our hands (and our financial resources) to bear on this effort—to make sure that words lead to action.  Traps abound: overlapping and competing mandates, duplication of effort, lack of follow-through, and failure to respect and engage with the people affected. But the core battle entails using the many means at our disposal to translate ideas and ideals into reality.

For too long the world has parceled its challenges into head, heart, soul, and hands.  This is a dangerous and unwise approach.  Even as we work to create new faith-development alliances, we need to incorporate the role of all four elements. The temples are not only about heart and soul; the international institutions are not only about mind and brawn. We have much in common, and much to share.

Revised June 10, 2005. Thanks to William Lesher, Veit Burger, Lucy Keough, and Marisa van Saanen for thoughtful comments.