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

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.