As the tens of thousands of people protesting against the economic policies of the world's most powerful governments and the international institutions that represent them departed the streets of Genoa last July, James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, was in Australia, telling an audience that "you have to be open with critics and you have to listen."

"The one thing you can't do is listen when they have got acid in their hands or [are] throwing a Molotov cocktail at you," he said. "That's the group that's getting all the publicity, when in fact there are many serious organizations with whom we are having a continuous interface."

The irony of both Wolfensohn's words and presence in Australia was not lost on some of the World Bank's strongest critics, who had engaged the Bank's president in a multi-year, multi-country assessment of the economic policies prescribed worldwide by the World Bank over the past two decades. You see, Wolfensohn should have been at the wrap-up forum in Washington following the Genoa economic summit of the G-8 governments to receive the draft findings from his joint exercise with civil society, known as the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI), and to lead the World Bank in a discussion of the changes in policy and policy-making the study proved to be necessary. He was, to say the least, conspicuous by his absence.

So was virtually all of the Bank's senior management. In what is rapidly becoming a familiar pattern, the World Bank started, under Wolfensohn's early leadership in the mid-1990s, publicly embracing citizens' groups, including long-time opponents, as part of initiatives designed to address controversial Bank policies - only to distance itself from the results of those initiatives when they have come in. Well-publicized, for example, has been the World Bank's disregard of the findings and recommendations of the World Commission on Dams, which the Bank had helped establish.

At the core of the frustration and anger that has been boiling over onto the streets, first in the South and now the North, has been the exclusion of affected populations, as well as their priorities and knowledge of local realities, from virtually all significant economic decision-making by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and other such official institutions. Even well-intentioned Southern governments cannot be responsive to their citizens while they are under the thumb of these institutions. Major initiatives like the Heavily-Indebted Poor (HIPC) Countries debt relief and the much-vaunted Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) have lost their credibility as the World Bank and IMF have turned them to the disadvantage of the already- disadvantaged by requiring that participating governments continue to adhere to Washington prescriptions.

SAPRI, which our organization has coordinated on behalf of the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network (SAPRIN), has engaged the World Bank on this overarching issue of the conditioning of all foreign aid and international loans on a country adopting a set of "adjustment," or free-market, policies. The World Bank and IMF have restructured more than 90 national economies around the world in this fashion to facilitate foreign investment, imposing such policies as privatization, "labor-market flexibilization" (read "wage suppression") and trade and financial-sector liberalization.

These policies, decided on undemocratically and implemented precipitously and indiscriminately, have wreaked havoc on domestic economies. The low purchasing power, high borrowing costs, cheap imports and expensive services that they have ushered in have wiped out thousands of the small and medium-sized enterprises and farms that produce for the local market and provide most of a country's jobs. They have, in the process, increased poverty and inequality, de-stabilized banking systems and increased foreign debt. Along with the World Bank and governments, SAPRIN documented this phenomenon in a number of countries through a series of participatory workshops, national fora and field investigations following the extensive mobilization of civil society across virtually all major social and economic sectors.
Hundreds of organizations were brought together and participated in the SAPRI endeavors with their governments and the Bank in Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Bangladesh and Hungary, and SAPRIN took similar but independent initiatives in the Philippines and Mexico, while launching smaller projects elsewhere, including Argentina. Key structural adjustment policies were selected and assessed for their impact on various population groups and areas and sectors of economic importance. Those findings have been synthesized by a SAPRIN international team into a global report that will be released to the general public at major public forums in Washington and at the European Union in Brussels in mid-April.

That the World Bank has chosen to ignore the SAPRI findings despite Wolfensohn's original commitment to utilize them "to do business differently" does not surprise us or most of the other SAPRIN participants. While we would have liked to have seen the World Bank's president display some vision and courage, he is, after all, in the service of his Board, which is dominated by Northern finance ministers and their constituencies in the world's major financial centers. And it is clear that those forces are not yet ready for change, despite the financial crises that have run a devastating course from Mexico to East Asia to Russia and back to Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina in Latin America.

In the end, SAPRIN has achieved its goals of mobilizing civil society on this critical issue and demonstrating the capacity of ordinary citizens to play an active and incisive role in the area of economic policymaking. The results from the joint initiative with the Bank will now be used to hold the bank accountable as it struggles to maintain the little credibility that it has left.

At this critical moment, the World Bank has been tested and it has failed. It has eluded any serious consideration of SAPRI findings that its own staff and consultants helped to produce in a far-reaching and well-organized effort with the very critics and other civil-society groups that its president has claimed are crucial to World Bank learning.

His words ring hollow. Along with the other multilateral institutions, the World Bank has made clear that it will continue to manage the globalization process and national economies on behalf of global corporations, banks and other financial institutions. And there will still be no meaningful role for organized citizenry to play at the tables where such decisions are taken.

Where there is no democracy, ultimately the only recourse is to take to the streets. Activist organizations and social movements will continue to pressure there, and via other means available, for change. They, SAPRIN among them, will challenge today's prevailing policies and offer democratic and viable alternatives. Whether there is a constructive resolution to this intensifying confrontation and an end to the wholesale social, economic and financial devastation of the past 20 years, rests squarely in the hands of the global political and economic managers.