Contested terrain: World Bank projects and participatory development

The World Bank has long had a contradictory relationship with participatory development. While many projects have provoked critique and resistance from civil society, others claim to enable social participation. While social and environmental safeguard policies and a citizen engagement framework now mandate projects to include stakeholder engagement, elite capture and thin delivery of policy commitments remain widespread. This study traces the long-term processes and outcomes of five outlier World Bank projects from the 1990s that included participatory elements - such as power-sharing over social funds, support for autonomous, multi-level social organizations and collective titling of ethnic territories to document how the Bank engages with external stakeholders, particularly citizens. Over the longer term, these projects lacked strong national allies and their most innovative contributions were reversed, watered down or at best contained - though these differences mattered to social actors. The most analytically significant finding is that ostensibly participatory projects can have not only contested and uneven outcomes (‘mixed results’), but also contradictory interaction effects.