The Water Cooler
A refreshing gulp of reports and ramblings from policy-central.
The World Bank takes on the AIDS pandemic
Summary:Renewing approaches
AIDS is a big deal these days. Lots of thought is going into
how to reverse this disease, which is increasingly understood as an
obstacle to socio-economic development in Africa. New light is
also emerging on the extent to which the disease exists in India
and rural China as well.
All this is fine and well, but I still must say I was pleasantly surprised to read this article about the World Bank getting involved in the fight against AIDS. Seems like this great organisation has heeded the world's complaints about its sterile theoretical economic outlook on the world, and is finally finding a new identity as, yes, a lending organization, but with a holistic approach.
I was all the more pleased to find this article, and the great global health policy blog that led me to it, after a conversation I had this morning with a classmate. We were having a few pints with our fellow Hertians (that's what I've come to calling students of the Hertie School of Governance) following our end-of-semester applied economics exam (now you know why I haven't written much this week).
Anyway, he was telling me about his undergraduate studies in development, and how everybody in that field would think he was mad if he ever told them about his dream to work for the World Bank. According to this friend of mine -- and it certainly doesn't surprise me -- development studies people are rather fond of WB-bashing. Although he shared many of their outlooks on the world, he wanted to work for the monolithic organization that was their supposed antithesis.
Anyhow, the moral of his story was that it is exactly people like him, this colleague of mine, that the World Bank and other dinausaurial governance apparatuses need if they are to develop the approaches to the issues of our generation call for. "The machine is there, you just have to polish it from the inside to make it do what you think -- what you know it should be doing."
Seems like the World Bank is a couple years ahead of my colleague. The more I learn about the many areas to which public policy is applicable though, the more I am convinced that the shift from government to governance demarcate a timely maturation in the way public policy is being done around the world -- and the more I become an optimist.
All this is fine and well, but I still must say I was pleasantly surprised to read this article about the World Bank getting involved in the fight against AIDS. Seems like this great organisation has heeded the world's complaints about its sterile theoretical economic outlook on the world, and is finally finding a new identity as, yes, a lending organization, but with a holistic approach.
I was all the more pleased to find this article, and the great global health policy blog that led me to it, after a conversation I had this morning with a classmate. We were having a few pints with our fellow Hertians (that's what I've come to calling students of the Hertie School of Governance) following our end-of-semester applied economics exam (now you know why I haven't written much this week).
Anyway, he was telling me about his undergraduate studies in development, and how everybody in that field would think he was mad if he ever told them about his dream to work for the World Bank. According to this friend of mine -- and it certainly doesn't surprise me -- development studies people are rather fond of WB-bashing. Although he shared many of their outlooks on the world, he wanted to work for the monolithic organization that was their supposed antithesis.
Anyhow, the moral of his story was that it is exactly people like him, this colleague of mine, that the World Bank and other dinausaurial governance apparatuses need if they are to develop the approaches to the issues of our generation call for. "The machine is there, you just have to polish it from the inside to make it do what you think -- what you know it should be doing."
Seems like the World Bank is a couple years ahead of my colleague. The more I learn about the many areas to which public policy is applicable though, the more I am convinced that the shift from government to governance demarcate a timely maturation in the way public policy is being done around the world -- and the more I become an optimist.
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