World Bank President James Wolfensohn tried to convince a sceptical crowd on environment activists here Tuesday that his agency was now more open and self- critical.

“The World Bank is doing its best to be less arrogant, to listen,” Wolfensohn told the ‘Rio Plus Five’ forum that is meeting here to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit. “International financial institutions do not function singly — they must function as partners.”

Arguing that the agency was reshaping its efforts to concentrate on the needs of the poor rather than simply economic growth, he added, “Frankly, I’m concerned with just how damn difficult it is.”

Ahora Te Paraeke Mead of New Zealand’s Maori Congress called Wolfensohn’s arguments for more responsible Bank policies toward the environment an attempt to “put a glossy face on policies that have been quite destructive.”

Nor were NGOs taken with Wolfensohn’s worry that many Bank projects — such as funding for dams from Chile to India that may be detrimental to people and the environment — may proceed anyway without the Bank’s oversight.

Wolfensohn told the forum that the framework for investment in the developing world has changed in recent years. With the private sector now putting in about five times the size of the funding as that of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (about 60 billion dollars yearly), projects like India’s Three Gorges Dam “will go ahead whether we like it or not”, he said.

The key, he said, is for the Bank to use its leverage to ensure that such projects are as environmentally safe as they can be and do not displace or harm people.

The concept that international funding agencies can affect governance positively was echoed by James Gustave Speth, Administrator of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), who said such governance is “here to stay…and it will inevitably expand.”

Global governance would not, however, destroy the sovereignty of states, Speth argued, claiming that most global bodies created this century, from the International Maritime Union to the United Nations, have accompanied the rise of strong states.

The power of agencies today, Wolfensohn said, lay more in their advocacy of beneficial approaches than in their purse-strings: “Our ability to speak out is more important than the money.”

In that effort, said Stephan Schmidheiny, head of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the private sector of the North could play a key role simply by pressing for more efficient environmental policies. “We can do more with less,” he said. “Markets are all about efficiency.”

But Bella Abzug, president of the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation, said that the attitudes of the financial leaders left her with “a certain amount of disappointment and anger.” Women are being left out of their vision of global governance, as are any other groups interested in forging community life, she argued.

“It’s not just markets,” Abzug said. “It’s homes, it’s villages, it’s areas where women and men can build communities.”

Global governance “is presented as a fact because it’s an ideal,” Mead told IPS. “It’s a value system of what is ideal, based on a minority of capitalist, free-market opinions. But if the market is so great, then why is Mother Earth not improving, and in fact getting worse?”

The idea that markets prodded by the advocacy of international agencies can solve most pressing problems shows “no real-world understanding of poverty,” added Jocelyn Dow of the Guyana-based NGO ‘Red Threads’.

Dow shared Wolfensohn’s own doubts that the World Bank is even capable of influencing that much economic activity given the larger scale of private-sector loans to the South.

The problem, as Wolfensohn concedes, is that NGOs will remain wary until the record of the major private and governmental financial institutions improves. But although he concedes the Bank has made errors in environmental projects, he says its record is changing for the better in places like Brazil’s Rondonia state, where Bank-supported projects have drawn criticism for potentially displacing thousands of people.

Speth added that, before the South is expected to meet its commitments to improve the environment, the North must fulfill its own promises made five years ago at Rio to increase development assistance (ODA) to the developing world. For one thing, the summit set a target of 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to be set aside as ODA.

“The rich countries have failed utterly to uphold their end of the Rio bargain,” Speth said. “They have not increased aid to the developing world but have decreased it — decreased it, if you take out humanitarian assistance, by as much as 25 percent.”

Ultimately, the Rio gathering of institutional heads and NGOs has at least helped to bring the two sides closer together in how they define problems, says Wally N’Dow, secretary-general of last year’s Habitat Summit in Istanbul.

“Naming is the start,” he told IPS. “Once you come up with the vocabulary, you can start to frame the solutions.”