Pressemitteilung: Absolvent der Uni Kassel als Experte im Weltbank-Video

Dr. Dustin Schäfer, a former student and doctoral candidate at the University of Kassel, completed his doctorate on the World Bank's Inspection Panel in the field of development policy and postcolonial studies this year. He can now be seen as an expert in a short film that was released last week to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the World Bank's Inspection Panel.

"The purpose of the Inspection Panel was to create a simple, accessible grievance mechanism for people who have been harmed [by World Bank projects]," explains Dustin Schäfer in the World Bank video.

The Inspection Panel is an accountability mechanism of the World Bank, the largest multilateral development bank, which has set itself the goal of fighting poverty. The World Bank first came under heavy criticism for its development projects in the 1980s.

"People have been impoverished and displaced by projects, which is in complete contradiction to what the projects were intended to achieve," says Dustin Schäfer.

Local resistance and international protests eventually led to the creation of the Inspection Panel in 1993, the first complaints mechanism of a multilateral financial institution at the time.

In the video, the Inspection Panel looks back on its history and work over the past three decades. In addition to former members of the panel, critical voices from academia and civil society who are intensively involved with the Inspection Panel also have their say. One of them is Dustin Schäfer, who currently heads the work on international financial institutions at the environmental and human rights organization Urgewald and is one of the leading experts on complaints mechanisms such as the Inspection Panel.

Dustin Schäfer from Eschwege, a trained automotive mechatronics technician, completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in vocational education at the University of Kassel, where he also completed a doctorate in political science as part of the Hans Böckler Foundation-funded junior research group "Protest and reform in the global political economy from a post-colonial perspective".