Re: GDG

This is my first post to this list in reference with the World Bank Gateway
project  http://www.worldbank.org/gateway , my name is Georges Drouet, I'm
the president of the Belgium based NGO Prospective Internationale which
goal is to promote Prospective Science in beetwen new generations through
education to make them aware of a sustainable future.

Our core idea is to create a *interactive and open virtual libray* in which
every person interested in participating in the definition of the policies
would be able to send its own ideas and, simultaneously, to consult the
ideas of every one of the other participants. As many of you are working
with, our substratum will be an Internet site.

I think the World Bank project is working on a similar way. But, due to
their bad habits, World Bank Global Development Gateway will work as an
ideas' vacuum. I mean their project is to suck our ideas, mix them with
their experience and write policies unilateraly. And that is the big
mistake. A really efficient, and by the way democratic, process require the
full participation of all the actors in the consultation (concerned poor
people, local NGOs, international NGOs, local governments, international
entities, researchers, decision-makers), but also in the discussion and in
the conception of the policies to be applied later.

I mean all the process has to be open, transparent, and requires a constant
feed-back from all the actors.

World Bank ideas' vacuum will suck our experience and then, months later,
we will receive a nice little page in the GDG website with the World Bank's
policies to be applied by every one if we want to receive their money...

What can we do?

The idea of a civil society steering committee sounds perfect to me, but we
must go further, we should open our ears, our eyes and our brains to the
real world, the one is suffering not only in the third world countries
(rebel warfare, poverty, disease, hunger, etc)  but also in the developing
countries (working as slaves, without any social, economical or
environmental correct framework and so on) and in the first world countries
(indigents, unemployed people, seniors, etc). We should use as many
communications tools as we can (internet, local televisions, local radios,
newspapers, news-letters, conferences, local networks and organisations,
conferences and speeches, talks, etc) to catch the word and the wills of
the humanity and then start an interactive process. In this process every
step of the synthesis should be accessible by every actor, it should be a
double flow analysis- synthesis and dissemination-feedback.

I'm affraid that World Bank (WB) process will be the usual one: information
gathering and then a total opacity, a bottom to top process in which even
the WB people could'nt be certain of the final result because of the power
and the bias of the political decision makers. Remember the Ravi Kanbur
World Bank Poverty Report, last minute modified by Larry Summers...

Why is the situation like this? Because the Bretton Woods institutions are
not independent because of the intromission mainly of the US Government
and, in a lower level, of the Japanese and European government, in the
policies drawing. In turn, the government are dependent of the corporate
power, the US one very particularly because of its corporate financing
concept. In turn, corporations are racing one with the other in a never
ending competition, a race to the bottom in which every commercial tricks
are used. The limit of this race is the end of natural ressources and the
huge explotation of human workforce in the cheapest conditions possible,
provoking an increasing gap in beetwen the richs and all the others.

Again we must conceive the transformation of the system thanks to a real
consultation of the humanity wills and, at the same time, understand the
world system with its ins and outs.

Our NGO is participating in one of the most interesting and democratic
proposal to transform competition into cooperation, the campaign is called
The Simultaneous Policy, the information is set out in
http://www.simpol.org

If you have some feedback, please send them to my address.

Thank you.

ISPO_short_brief=UK.doc

------------------------------------------
Prospective Internationale
Georges Drouet - President

28, place Morichar  1060 Bruxelles
tel: +32 486 751 668
fax: +32 2 538 10 82
pimail@brutele.be