What does that mean in tangible terms, for instance for the dam project in Laos?
That is really the only big dam project we’ve been doing lately. We assessed the situation and found that we were dealing with a sensitive environmental issue, including flooding and the need for nature conservation. So what we did was ensure that land in Laos was set aside for a National Park and efforts made to protect it. In that sense, we linked our support for the dam with demands for nature conservation. All in all, the value that we brought to that project wasn’t so much in the financing, most of the funds came from the private sector. We contributed on the social and environmental side. It seems that developmentally important projects cannot always rely on private-sector investments. A decade or so back, there was much excitement about unleashing market forces in infrastructure matters. That euphoria has pretty much dissipated. I think it is important to say which assumptions were correct and which ones were incorrect. The expectation was obviously overstated that there was goi
