Dam building and the World Bank: the evolving battle over partial reform

Udisha Saklani and Barnaby Joseph Dye

Chapter 20 in The Elgar Companion to the World Bank, 2024, pp 239-250 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Dams represent the World Bank’s iconic infrastructure project, symbolizing its early focus on large, top-down transformation and its subsequent shift towards infrastructure that is supposedly environmentally sustainable and socially responsible. However, scholarship remains divided on the extent of policy change, questioning whether the Bank has substantively altered realities on the ground, or merely adopted surface-level greenwashing. We contribute to this debate by analyzing three policy domains related to building dams: compensation, impact assessment, and public participation. For each, we detail the extent of change in the last two decades and, based on this analysis, assert a conceptual contribution. While prior research has primarily emphasized external catalysts such as protest movements and civil society activism as drivers of reform in the Bank’s dam building practices, we contend that internal struggles within the institution have been equally influential. This complex landscape reveals areas of substantive change coexisting alongside elements of continuity.

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781802204780.00033 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21163_20

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().