Ethics and Spiritual Values and the Promotion of Environmentally Sustainable Development

Last October, the World Bank and the Center for Respect of Life and Environment cosponsored a conference that sought to explore the ethics and values underlying current approaches to development, and to suggest the values and practices that are essential to sustainable development. Part revival meeting­with repentance and resolve to do good and part celebration of emerging best practices, the conference gal e development practitioners a chance to speak from their hearts and express their hopes for sustain able development. We have excerpted remarks given at the opening and c losing sessions by the following principal speakers: James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank; Ismail Serageldin, Vice President for Environmentally Sustainable Development of the World Bank; John Hoyt, President of the Center for Respect of Life and Environment; and Maurice Strong, Chairman of the Earth Council.

by James D. Wolfensohn

Defining and measuring effective development is very difficult.

Effective development is not just building a dam or some other element of infrastructure, or even helping on a school program or assisting with health facilities. It's not something that can he defined in terms of single projects or by increase in GDP per capita. If development were just monetary and material, candidly, after my trip to Africa, I would have been deeply depressed.

But what I saw and felt in Africa was a type of success in the villages and in areas of the country where people are emerging from deep, pervasive poverty. Within the framework of their tribal and familial system, people have a sense of grandeur, a sense of optimism, a sense of hope. They talk to you with excitement in their eyes about the future of their children, who, living on next to nothing, feel a sense of progress.

This sense of progress is not economic progress alone, but a recognition of roots: an affirmation of spiritual and cultural values. We need to nurture and encourage these value ­­ not push them into the television society. We need to recognize that these values are an important element of development.

Such visits have brought home to me the central need of the Bank to meld economic assistance with parallel spiritual, ethical, and moral development. It is in this context that we need to measure our progress, as well as relate to the groups with whom we are dealing.

We are engaged in a process at the Bank of measuring ourselves not by dollar value, but by the impact and effectiveness of our programs in the countries in which we are operating. And we are judging that impact and effectiveness not just in economic terms, but in terms that relate to the development of each society. I hope you will see a transition of the Bank's emphasis toward a balance between financial objectives and environmental objectives, with high moral and ethical standards guiding our various endeavors.