Gestaltung "staatlicher" Policy im Schatten der Weltbank: Urbane Infrastruktur-Entwicklung, Zwangsumsiedlung und der listige Staat in Indien

The new architecture of global governance entails an increasing transnationalisation of policy-making. It is ambivalent in its effects on state sovereignty and citizenship rights. One of the consequences of these developments has been a transformation of the state itself, its part transnationalisation and part privatisation, which also poses serious problems of accountability. In countries that have borrowed from the World Bank and IMF national policies today are negotiated between these institutions and the executive without either legislative deliberation or public participation. As nonstate actors, supra-national and sub-national, begin to shape the formulation and implementation of soft law and policy, citizen’s protest against these involve judicial contestation within state courts and international bodies. We delineate some of these shifts using ethnographic material from a World Bank financed urban infrastructure project, the MUTP being currently implemented in the city of Mumbai, India. We address the issue of overlapping sovereignties and fragmentation of citizenship rights along with their consequences for democratic decision-making. Moreover, we focus on the pragmatic judicial politics of activists in their quest for social justice.