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A scan of the Bank's reports and its programs reveals an extraordinarily eclectic range of activity in every corner of the globe: getting girls into school in Egypt and poor children to school in the Kyrgyz Republic; combating tb in Africa and malaria in Eritrea; managing forests in Southeast Asia and fisheries along rural coastlines; rushing emergency teams to Indonesia, the Maldives and Sri Lanka after the tsunami of 2004 and rebuilding strife-torn Central Africa; killing agricultural pests in Central Africa and developing the garment industry in Cambodia; pushing for court reform in the Philippines and building the power grid in the Dominican Republic; creating housing reform in Mexico and road-building in Poland.
Not least, the Bank now combats the money laundering that could fuel terrorism. It demands transparency in governments and offers transparency for itself. Millions of dollars are committed to reducing government corruption and to building civil society groups. The World Bank Institute trains aid workers. The Bank teams up not only with governments but with the World Wildlife Fund and the Scout Movement for children, with Conservation International and the UN's Programme on HIV/AIDS.
How can this panoply of good works be read as anything else than a commitment to justice or a panacea to disease, disaster and despair? Michael Goldman's Imperial Nature and Sebastian Mallaby's The World's Banker present alternative readings, neither concordant with the Bank's self-portrait but both resonant of tones in the Wolfowitz controversy.
Dissenting most strongly from the Bank's view of itself, sociologist Goldman subtitles his book "The World Bank and Struggles for Social justice in the Age of Globalization," but he quickly avows that justice, if it is to be found, will not be from the Bank. For decades, major infrastructure projects were at the heart of Bank programs. Dams, electrical grids, ports, and highways have a tangible character that appeals to Wall Street bankers, national leaders, and Bank economists alike. Managing water has a special appeal. If water can be contained and manipulated, nature's "waste" can be harnessed so that farmers can irrigate fields, manufacturers will obtain electricity, urban dwellers enjoy clean water, and residents along river banks will be protected from flooding. Investment, agricultural production, environmental control, health benefits—water projects promise them all.
Goldman had some reason to doubt these promises before he began his principal case study, the Nam Theun 2 Dam Project on the Mekong River in Laos. In the Thar desert of northwest India, the World Bank had invested in a massive irrigation canal system to pour Himalayan water into a harsh arid environment. Wealthy landowners turned land along the main arteries of the canals into export-producing farms. But along the minor arteries water disappeared. Systematic theft of cement left canals too porous to deliver water. In other places channels were sand-clogged, and adjacent land was waterlogged and salinated. Driven into debt, poor farmers were forced off their land and into part-time labor, indentured servanthood, or sharecropping.
Further south, in 1990, thousands of villagers set off on a "long march" to protest their forced resettlement to make way for a dam in the Narmada Valley. Local authorities were not impressed. Protesters did, however, disturb the Bank, which faced disconcerting international publicity about the refusal of its officials to heed hydrological and engineering reports that drinking water would not get to where it was promised, entire fisheries could be lost, and irrigation schemes would fail. As a result the Bank pulled out. Shortly after he became President of the Bank in 1995, James Wolfensohn canceled another large dam project in Nepal, fearful that growing protests would spur another "Narmada effect."
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