Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul the German minister for Economic Cooperation and Development told the final plenary session in the Bundeshaus, the former German parliament, "There are legitimate concerns from stakeholders who feel disadvantaged and powerless vis-à-vis large international service providers."

"I welcome the proposal to begin a stakeholder dialogue to review the issues linked with privatization because it could lead to better understanding of success and failures in this regard," she said.

She promised Germany would facilitate the talks, and later told Conference News Daily that her government would hold a conference or a seminar on the subject before the World Summit on Sustainable Development next year in Johannesburg. The Bonn conference was aimed at setting policy goals for the Johannesburg meeting, which itself is a ten-year review of the 1992 World Environmental Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Wieczorek-Zeul said that the Bonn conference had unprecedented participation from nongovernmental groups. Indeed the debate on the conferences final text was joined with equal power by government and nongovernment representatives working over every sentence.

Departing from her prepared text at the closing summit, Wieczorek-Zeul said water was key to development around the world and worldwide development was made even more important in the post Sept. 11 world.

"Industrialized countries must realize there must be essential progress in reaching better terms of trade and there have to be steps towards a more just world order and there have to be steps also for ends of global governance or else the danger of ongoing violence in our world will be overwhelming. "There is a chance that we will reach, after the new developments, a better world order but it is not yet decided whether we will find ourselves in an insecure order or even disorder on this planet. That is the challenge facing us this century.

Speaking with her back only a few hundred meters from the Rhine river, she said, "The Rhine has become a European river which connects four European countries, it has become a source of benefit for all that are sharing, and all that are neighbors. It is a link between our countries and it is also a link for cooperation among Europeans. We have learned in the last century after terrible wars and terrible bleeding of people that it is very most important to concentrate all our energies on construction and cooperation and not on confrontation and fighting. In this spirit let us all work for a better world. Let us all prepare for Johannesburg to have a September of 2002, which will be a more just, more cooperative world."

German environmental minister Jürgen Trittin said the delegates should congratulate themselves for a " very successful outcome."

"Efficient water management is a key element in the fight against poverty and for sustainable development. Efficient water management largely depends on good governance," he said.

"Efficient water management can be best achieved in a decentralized approach because local residents take a great interest in the long term availability of their water resources. All stakeholders, and I underline 'all' stakeholders have to be included.

"Cooperation between government and different groups inside civil society is necessary precondition for sustainable water resource management.

"I trust in your dedication and commitment that by the time of Johannesburg and the World Water Forum in Japan in 2003 we will be able to present some encouraging examples of how to link sustainable water development to development."

Margaret Catley-Carlson of the Global Water Partnership, the facilitator of the plenary session who coordinated discussion on the final text of the conference recommendations, turned to Trittin and Wieczorek-Zeul and said "Ministers, it was a remarkable degree of faith that you took the risk of bringing together people who have known different positions across a wide spectrum of views and brought them together for five days of intensive work. The result is an increase in the consensus about how we go forward with water resource issues. This remarkable grouping has pulled it off.

"There was a day long ago when you might have a conference like this but when the views of the international community, civil society, trade unions business and industry would've been collected separately and the governments would get down to the business of what was to be said. We neither avoided nor totally resolved the contentious issues in water affairs at national and international levels. I think we did it. I know we did it. We have a rough agreement on the way forward. Ministers, you took a risk, but I think the conference results well justify that risk. We are convinced that we can at, and we must. We have the keys, the Bonn keys.

Kadar Asmal, South African minister of education, who was injured in a fall and spoke to the plenary via a recorded video, said ". Let us not be complacent. The downside of all this international policy dialogue on water is that we speak in generalities, we lose focus on the women walking miles to fetch water, on the urban squatters paying significant proportion of their daily income to water vendors and on the children playing in disease ridden pools among festering waste.

"These are images that we need to carry in our minds back home. To question what we are going to do on Monday morning when we set at our desks, and what we can achieve in our own spheres of influence in the nine months before Johannesburg. It is a gestation period that should bear fruit."

Albert E. Fry of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development told Conference News Daily after the plenary broke up, "The conference avoided an ideological fight over public versus private delivery of water services. The conference focused correctly on the issue of efficient versus inefficient management of water. Now we can get on with the task of delivering water to the poor by a wide range of public-private partnerships.

Brazilian delegate Mitzi Gurgel Valente da Costa said the conference was "well organized," but added some of the final declaration language "was frankly insulting to developing countries."

She said a paragraph reading "The United Nations and the international community should strengthen their commitment and their efforts to enable developing countries to manage water sustainable" in her view, "implies that only developed countries know how to develop sustainable water systems"

"Brazil would not agree with that," she said.

David Boys of Public Services International, a conglomeration of municipal workers' unions said, " We hope that future water conferences will hear more from public water managers, local government officials and water workers. They are key to improving public water and sanitation systems. "We welcome the German government's support for a global and systematic review of the impact of privatization."