Projects funded by the World Bank Group’s private sector arm fuel violent conflict – it’s time to reform the system

Brian Ganson, Anne Spencer Jamison and Witold Jerzy Henisz

To what extent does private investment help developing countries to reduce conflict and violence and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals?

This is a hotly debated issue. Most international institutions such as the World Bank Group take the stance that the problem is not enough private investment. So they mobilise public resources to subsidise and protect private sector actors with the goal of greatly increasing foreign direct investment.

Meanwhile, community, labour and human rights advocates – particularly in fragile and conflict-affected countries – tend instead to see the dominant patterns of foreign direct investment as part of a continuing history of exploitation of the developing world.

To help shed light on this debate, we undertook a comprehensive study of thousands of projects of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group. We focused on the