State of Research on the IP
Most of the research available on the IP and its practice is by the IP itself or from a Legal or Non-Governmental Organisation Perspective. There is very little research that has been carried out on the IP process with regard to its impact at the grassroots from an explicitly political science perspective. Existing literature (above all Fox/Brown 1998, Clark/Fox/Treakle 2003) have established the following points:
The establishment of the IP and concerns that key actors in this process, such as the WB, civil society and nation states are contested arenas.
The ineffectiveness of the IP during the first years as a result of undermining of standard procedure by IP management and obstruction of IP investigations by Nation states who saw these as a threat to their sovereignty.
The IP’s assertion that they are more than a mere public relations outfit of the WB
The relatively few IP cases handled in comparison to the thousands of WB Projects. The IP, as of June 2015, has handled 103 Complaints.
Dams have been a prominent trigger for IP cases
The unexpected prominence of NGOs based in the Global South in leading cases to the IP
The scarcity of a self-critical and cooperative stance amongst Bank management, who almost always denied policy violations
That civil society claims and related IP investigations did not stop the projects but rather tended to influence WB policy more effectively than the specific projects
The IP has led to more social and environmental awareness amongst WB staff and reduced the number of projects with obviously disastrous consequences
The IP Mechanism threatens to obstruct projects which do not adhere to the safeguard policies and there have been attempts by the WB to water down these policies to prevent such obstruction (See Ziai 2016: 45-48).
Nevertheless the IP cases of the past years have been hardly studied with a few exceptions. Which is why the Project seminar sought to study a few of those cases comprehensively, and present the findings here.