Financial Times

The JVP and the World Bank – clashes apart - see eye-to-eye on crucial issues like poverty and rural communities with the Bank’s outgoing country director Peter Harrold saying its unfortunate there wasn’t a dialogue between the two.

Asked in an interview whether there should have been a healthy relationship with groups opposed to donor agencies, Harrold – who returns to Washington to take up a new position at the Bank’s headquarters next week, recalled: “Maybe I should have … apart from anything, they (JVP) are the third largest political party here and from that perspective we like to have a dialogue with all major representatives.”

Harrold, target of a protest campaign by the JVP which has raised concerns of donors funding mostly the northeast and neglecting the rest of the country, said the Bank has with some success focused attention on the pattern of development in Sri Lanka and how inequality has been growing “and how the poor, especially the poor in the provinces and distant areas, have not been able to participate in the growth process or seen any change in their poverty status.” He says differences with the JVP have narrowed down sharply because most of the Bank’s policies and JVP thinking were both on community development, decision making down to the village level and a role for the rural poor in national policymaking among other. “We see eye to eye with the JVP on all these issues. We see the need for empowerment of the village people; so does the JVP. We believe strongly in supporting governance structures at the local level that generate honest use of public resources and that’s the JVP thinking to. We believe very much that agriculture, rural infrastructure, rural opportunities, rural industries, etc should take a much higher profile in the national policy framework.

So does the JVP,” he said, as he wound up on a challenging four years in the World Bank saddle in Colombo.

Ever since the peace process began and the World Bank expanded its funding of pro-peace projects, the JVP and the Bank have been on a collision course with the former accusing the Bank of doling out funds for the northeast while ignoring the south.

Efforts for the two sides to meet to discuss opposing views and find some common ground, didn’t work out.

The World Bank country director reckons he should have tried harder in initiating a dialogue. “I probably should have been more aggressive in seeking a dialogue. It may have not worked. Yet I should have tried harder to have a dialogue and maybe issued an open invitation to the JVP,” he said reflecting on his Colombo stint.

Harrold said when the JVP was in government they chose to run the ministries that deal with the rural poor, an issue that was close to the Bank too.

“We had a considerable synergy of interests but unfortunately in their minds we represented the forces of world capitalism which they are implacably opposed to. Thus it was politically impossible for them to align with our line of thinking. What I am sad about is that we didn’t have a dialogue,” he noted.

There was one occasion when the two sides were close to a high-level meeting when the World Bank Vice President was visiting Colombo last year. “We got very close to having a meeting when the World Bank Vice President was visiting but it clashed with a meeting with the President (Mahinda Rajapaksa),” Harrold said adding that he however met JVP’s Lal Kantha when he was a minister and that meeting “was a pleasant one.”

That was the only official contact between a maverick JVP politician and the Bank.

The World Bank Colombo chief also said there is a marked difference in the way the Bank works now with governments and civil society, than before. “We now listen to the people and their needs. Earlier we would probably force a country to accept our prescription thinking that’s best for the country.”