In early October last year, over a thousand marchers
left Dupont Circle and proceeded up Connecticut
Avenue to the Washington Sheraton, site of the
annual meetings of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), which are held in
Washington, D.C. every two out of three years. While
Bank/IMF meetings in Europe have often been
marked by big street demonstrations, this was the
first large-scale action in the United States focusing
on those two multilateral lending institutions.
The march came at the end of a two-day conference
on the Bank and IMF, and preceded a week of
vigils, street theater, and other actions to protest the
destructive impact of IMF and World Bank policies.
The conference, which offered workshops and panels
on issues ranging from “The Cold Reality of Hot
Money” to “Struggling for Health in Unhealthy
Economies,” brought together over 300 U.S. solidarity
and grassroots activists as well as nearly 100
activists from abroad. The conference was organized
by members of the grassroots working group of the
50 Years is Enough (50YIE) campaign, while the
demonstration was organized jointly with the
National Commission for Democracy in Mexico.
The 1995 events were a high watermark for the
50YIE campaign. The campaign emerged in early
1994 out of discussions among six organizations with
extensive experience monitoring and lobbying the
Bank and the IMF: Oxfam-America, the Development
GAP, Global Exchange, International Rivers Network,
Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Defense
Fund. These groups wanted to take advantage of the
educational, media and advocacy opportunities
opened up by the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of
the founding of the World Bank and IMF.
The campaign rapidly grew to include over 140
U.S. groups, including faith-based justice and peace
organizations, environmental groups, solidarity
groups, and development organizations. It forged
alliances with over 170 partner organizations worldwide,
including more than 40 in Latin America and
the Caribbean. The 50YIE campaign is the U.S. version
of a broader international movement that also
uses the slogan “50 Years is Enough.”
Campaign members united around a set of proposals
based on a five-point program: openness and
John Gershman is a research associate at the Institute for
Development Research and the Institute for Health and
Social Justice.
full public accountability of the Bank and IMF, and
participation of affected women and men in all
aspects of their projects and policies; the reorientation
of Bank and IMF economic-policy reforms to
promote more equitable development; an end to
environmentally destructive lending and support for
self-reliant, resource-conserving development;
reduction of the size and power of the two organizations,
and rechanneling of resources into other
more participatory and accountable development
initiatives; and multilateral debt reduction.
Based upon this platform, issue-oriented working
groups drafted comprehensive background and
briefing papers on different aspects of Bank and IMF
operations. Functional working groups then focused
on getting this information and analysis out to the
media and policy makers as well as to different grassroots
communities. A group of women formed a
gender caucus both as a response to the absence in
the campaign of a clear gender-based critique of
Bank and IMF policies and practices, and to call
attention to the lack of women in leadership positions
within the organization.
Juliette Majot, a steering committee member from
the International Rivers Network, points out that a
key element of 50YIE’s success was that it built upon
the foundation of an already well-established multilateral
development-bank campaign largely comprised
of Third World activists and their Washingtonbased
allies. A broad range of organizations-including
groups that view themselves as “abolitionists” as
well as those that see themselves as “reformists”-
united behind the campaign’s radical reform agenda.
This unity was based on the reputation of the
founding member organizations in the broader environment
and development community as well as on
the profound restructuring envisioned in the platform
which, in effect, erased the distinction between
radical reform and abolition. The major difference
between 50YIE and other efforts was the campaign’s
public willingness to attack U.S. appropriations for
the Bank and IMF, a stance other advocacy groups
had been unwilling to take as a means of exerting
pressure.
D during its first year, the campaign focused on generating
media publicity, which peaked with the
1994 Bank-IMF annual meetings held in Madrid. It
was able to get widespread coverage in the U.S. and
foreign press of its criticisms of Bank and IMF poli-
cies. After the Madrid
meeting, media interest
shifted away from the
Bank and the IMF, with
brief blips around the
December, 1994 peso crisis
in Mexico, and the ap-
ointment of investment
ganker James Wolfensohn
as president of the World
Bank in June, 1995. The campaign shifted its
emphasis to grassroots edu-
cattion, mobilization and
advocacy.
The campaign’s outreach
coordinator worked with
local coalitions in half a
dozen cities nationwide, including San Francisco,
Chicago, and Burlington, Vermont. These local coali-
tions organized teach-ins, conferences and guerrilla
theater, and developed popular-education materials
and a poster series. A bimonthly letter-writing cam-
paign on issues advanced by campaign members
gave Washington lobbying efforts a grassroots base.
The combination of principled unity with decentral-
ization has, says steering committee member Juliet
Majot, allowed the campaign to “shift its strategic
priorities from lobbying, to media, to mobilization,
depending on the situation.” The October, 1995
gathering marked a convergence of the principal
streams of activity: the conference reflected the cam-
paign’s outreach and education efforts; the demon-
stration, its grassroots mobilization; and the 24
meetings between campaign members and Bank and
IMF directors, its lobbying and advocacy component.
The campaign’s media visibility and policy leverage
were principally due to two factors: the fiftieth
anniversary, and support from a handful of Congress
members including Barney Frank of Massachusetts.
In the absence of the fiftieth-anniversary news hook,
.. 50YIE has become much less successful at using the
media to advance its agenda. Partly in response to
the bad press generated by SOYIE, Wolfensohn has
developed a much more sophisticated Bank public-
:’ relations campaign. He canceled the economically
.. and environmentally catastrophic Arun Dam project
– in Nepal shortly after assuming office, and has pro-
: posed decentralizing the Bank’s operations and
increasing the involvement of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and civil society in Bank activi-
ties. As a result, the Bank has become a more com-
plex target, to which the campaign has yet to devel-
op a compelling response.
Historically, the US. Congress and the Treasury
Department have been the two main channels to
influence Bank and IMF policy. When the Republicans
assumed the majority in Congress in October, 1994,
the campaign concentrated its lobbying efforts pri-
marily on the Treasury Department and the US. exec-
utive directors of the two agencies. “The capacity to
convert grassroots pressure into changes at the Bank
and Fund without Congress is one of the largest chal-
lenges that the campaign faces,” says John Ruthrauff
of the Center for Democratic Education.
The campaign is currently in the midst of a major
transformation. A name change is on the agenda. 50
Years is Enough, while having gained some press
recognition, has built-in obsolescence as a name.
The organization also has had to grapple with its
own weaknesses and limitations. Most of the cam-
paign’s efforts to date have focused on the issues
most familiar to i t s members: the environmental
damage caused by large infrastructure projects, the
social and economic impacts of structural-adjust-
ment programs, and information-transparency
issues. The campaign is working to develop greater
expertise about the kinds of lending increasingly
favored by the Bank, such as social-sector lending
and direct support to the private sector. In order to
strengthen its ties with other U.S. grassroots
activists, the campaign has also formed a Making
the Links caucus, whose task is to develop clear ana-
lytical and activist connections between economic
restructuring in the United States and abroad.
Despite the need for retooling, the campaign has
had an important impact on a number of fronts. The
demands of Southern groups–such as conditioning
Bank and IMF appropriations on greater transparen-
cy-are now more forcefully heard in Washington,
D.C. The campaign has also carved out space in the
mainstream media for critical analysis of the impact
of Bank and IMF operations. The fact that the World
Bank felt compelled to build a more sophisticated
public-relations campaign, including a ten-page
response to the 50YIE platform, demonstrates that it
takes the campaign seriously. And as a result of
SOYIE’s work, the Rank and the IMF are now firmly
on the agenda of solidarity and other grassroots
groups in the United States.
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