Anthropological Approaches To Resettlement

Policy, Practice, And Theory

Michael M. Cernea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429714702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about people who have been forced resettle because of development projects. It takes stock of recent applied social science research on involuntary resettlement and forms a part of an international discussion on theories of resettlement and what social scientists can do about it.

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Anthropological Approaches to Involuntary Resettlement: Policy, Practice, and Theory

Scott E. Guggenheim
Michael M. Cernea

Introduction

The 1980s might well go down in history as the “decade of displacement”. Whether caused by disasters that ranged from famines in Africa, wars in the Middle East, or to homelessness in America, the close of the twentieth century will be remembered for the large numbers of people evicted from their houses, farms, and communities and forced to find a living elsewhere.

This book is examines a special type of displacement. It is about people who have been forced to move because of development projects. Displacement caused by the construction of large dams and the reservoirs that they form is undoubtedly the most commonly studied form of development caused displacement, but all projects that acquire already occupied land involve varying degrees of resettlement.

Resettlement has slowly moved into the limelight of development concerns. The heightened interest in resettlement derives in part from the more general concern over the adverse environmental and social impacts created by large infrastructure projects. Another source has been the widely publicized and increasingly well organized resistance to resettlement in many parts of the world. In Brazil, for instance, community activists formed the Regional Commission Against Large Dams (CRAB), which has since evolved into a national federation for people affected by resettlement. In India, another country with an active tradition of rural organizing, opposition to resettlement caused by the Narmada River Development projects has become an international as well as a national rallying point for criticisms of development models based on capital intensive economic growth through large-scale infrastructure development.

Table 1.1 Estimates of national resettlement caused by development projects¹

	Time Period	Number of People
China	1950–1990	20,000,000
India	1950 –1990	18,500,000
Thailand	1963–1977	130,000
Brazil	1980–1990	400,000
Turkey	1980–1990	300,000

Yet from a development perspective and the perspective of the contributors to this book, a third cause of the new focus on resettlement is equally important. While surely there are projects where involuntary resettlement can and should be avoided entirely, equally surely, there are many cases where societies must balance the costs of resettlement with benefits such as safe water supplies, efficient transportation systems, or irrigated agriculture. Reconciling the need of developing societies to improve their physical infrastructure with the protection of the rights and interests of the people most immediately affected by displacement is a major issue that, until recently, few countries were prepared to address.

The challenge of “solving” the resettlement dilemma can only grow. International concern over resettlement has largely focused on internationally financed projects, yet internationally financed development projects typically account for only a small proportion of development activities in any given country. Indeed, in larger developing countries such as Brazil, China, India, or Indonesia such projects account for a quite small share of overall resettlement, although international assistance does make up a disproportionate share of the very largest projects.

Aggregate information on the number of people who have been displaced by development projects is difficult to locate, and all figures must be taken as indicative rather than definitive. Table 1.1 is drawn from diverse sources that have attempted to quantify national, development-caused resettlement. In sum, a worldwide estimate of some one to two million people per year (Cemea 1990) is not unreasonable. Rising populations, growing economies, and increasing land scarcity ensure that in coming decades, the numbers of people displaced by planned infrastructural development will continue to rise.

What Makes Resettlement Caused by Development Unique?

Social scientists have drawn useful parallels between involuntary resettlement and other types of human movements. Comparisons with voluntary settlement programs illustrate many of the problems that both voluntary and involuntary resettlers face in adapting to a new social and physical environment once they have moved. Nevertheless, while useful insights can be gained through comparative studies of human movements, there are important differences between displacement caused by development projects and other categories of population movement such as those arising from natural disasters, civil strife, or spontaneous, voluntary movement. Isolating the features that distinguish development-caused resettlement from other human movements is important not just for analytic clarity. The policies and actions to address resettlement issues will differ according to how the problem is formulated.

Involuntary resettlement stands apart from most voluntary population movements (such as settlement in frontier areas, or emigration to make a better living) because it is nearly all “push” and no “pull.” The riverine farmer facing the rising waters of a reservoir can hardly make a free decision about the merits of abandoning his or her farm to seek a better life elsewhere because there is only one option present. Not surprisingly, although anxiety and insecurity are associated with any type of large scale population movement, they are present at higher rates among involuntary resettlers than with people who voluntarily move in search of new opportunities. While there is certainly some fuzziness along the boundary of this distinction (see Agneta et al., Chapter 12, on the Ethiopian settlement program or Aberle, Chapter 9, on the Navaho relocation in the United States), the difference is significant.

A second difference between voluntary and involuntary settlement lies in the makeup of the displaced population. Voluntary settlement programs usually attract young families in the early stage of the household life cycle; in fact organized settlement programs usually include explicit screening criteria to select the types of settler families most likely to succeed in the new site. Voluntary settlers frequently migrate gradually, retaining social and economic ties to their origin villages that give them a cushion should they fail as well as extra resources from home to help them adjust to their new habitat.

By contrast, involuntary resettlement programs are indiscriminate. Entire populations are thrown into the same quandary at the same time. The diverse risk avoidance and social insurance mechanisms present in peasant communities around the world are disrupted and overwhelmed. Few indigenous coping strategies can manage the pressures which are placed on them when large groups of people suddenly find themselves all thrown onto the same limited resource base.

Involuntary resettlement caused by development projects also differs in important ways from involuntary displacement caused by famines or wars. The displacement caused by development projects is the direct outcome of a planned political decision to take land away from its current users. Most people believe that famine and war should be avoided, but the projects that cause displacement fit into national ideologies about development and are actively sought. Rationalized by beliefs such as “the greatest good for the greatest number,” such schemes reflect basic political choices concerning who should gain and suffer from development.²

Publicly financed development projects, however, have indisputable obligations towards affected people that in many ways are more complex than the obligations the state has towards disaster victims. As Shihata points out in Chapter 3, international law recognizes the right of the state to take over private land for national public needs, but the state also incurs an obligation to recompense the landholder.

A final difference is that people who are displaced by war or natural disasters are often able to return to their homelands once the turbulence has subsided. Their primary need is for sustenance in the interim. Although there are cases where refugee camps evolve into long term settlements, both in theory and practice refugee camps are intended to be temporary situations. Refugee development programs typically concentrate on handicrafts or labor intensive activities such as road building or contract labor, precisely because host countries do not want refugees to form enduring ties to their host environments.

In contrast, development caused displacement is permanent. The primary concern for people displaced by a development project is thus not how to survive until they can return to their farms, but how to survive once their farms have been destroyed. Refugee camps and emergency relief systems are not appropriate tools for solving their problems, and the extent that they provide an illusion that the social problems caused by displacement are under control, they can even be counter-productive. Conceived as short-term solutions to sustain people without forging ties to what are hopefully temporary living places, refugee relief systems do not provide resettlers with the means for long-term survival and prosperity. As several essays in this volume argue, successful resettlement programs for development projects must provide the ingredients for developing long term attachments to the new site: new agricultural lands, social connections with host communities, and symbolic identifications with the new environment.

Goal of This Book

The main objective of this volume is to take stock of recent applied social science research on involuntary resettlement. Although the literature on resettlement has grown,³ there have been no overviews of the field since Oliver-Smith and Hansen’s Involuntary Migration and Resettlement. A sustained discussion of the issues raised by development caused involuntary displacement and resettlement (henceforth “involuntary resettlement”) is thus long overdue. What creates the need for involuntary displacement, what happens during it, and how to improve resettlement outcomes are questions that lie at the heart of the development agenda today.

The articles collected here not only describe how resettlement has occurred in diverse contexts, but are written by social scientists from around the world who are themselves deeply engaged with the practical dimensions of resettlement, as fieldworkers, advocates, planners, and analysts. This book thus forms part of an international discussion not just about theories of resettlement, but what social scientists can do about it.

About half of the papers included here originated in a special international workshop on involuntary resettlement that was organized by Michael Cemea, William Partridge, and Scott E. Guggenheim for the 1988 World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Translating conference papers into the coherent framework required for a book is problematic at best (and incoherent at worst), yet three characteristics of the Zagreb discussions led to the decision to produce this book.

First, while much of the best research on resettlement is being carried out by social scientists in developing countries, there are few channels to exchange information among each other, especially since topics like resettlement are not normally covered by the major international journals. In the Zagreb meeting, anthropologists and sociologists from countries as far apart as Brazil and India could discuss their very different perspectives and experiences with resettlement.

The second purpose of the conference was to discuss the World Bank’s draft technical paper on its involuntary resettlement policy, which had been circulated to all participants several months in advance. Described further in Michael Cemea’s first contribution to this volume⁴, this was the first time that an international agency encouraged a dialogue with the professional social science community over a major development policy— an important if long overdue precedent. Reviewing the adequacy and appropriateness of the World Bank’s policy for diverse resettlement situations (see, for example, Aberle’s discussion of the applicability of the policy to the Navaho relocation in the United States in Chapter 9) provided a certain amount of integration from the outset, and the World Bank plays a prominent role in several of the book’s discussions.

A final reason for revising the conference papers into book format is. because collectively they define an approach to social science thinking about development that we think will become increasingly common. In many developing countries the breach between researcher and policy maker has historically been narrower than in countries such as the United States. Many of the contributors have themselves been involved in resettlement programs and bring information and perspectives on resettlement not readily available elsewhere. Adu-Aryee’s comparison of Akosombo and Kpong, for example, uses first-hand knowledge and primary material to analyze the ways that Ghana’s electricity board where he worked used or ignored the lessons from one of the earliest African resettlement schemes when designing the next one. Bartolomé similarly shows how planning information was obtained and used for resettlement design by the binational Yacyretá project while he was the director of its resettlement unit. Maria Teresa Serra, who contributed Chapter 5, is also the director of Eletrobras’s Environment office, which produced the social and environmental policies for Brazil’s energy sector. Narrowing the communication gap between academic and applied research must surely rank among social scientist’s highest p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Anthropological Approaches to Involuntary Resettlement: Policy, Practice, and Theory
• 2 Anthropological and Sociological Research for Policy Development on Population Resettlement
• 3 Legal Aspects of Involuntary Population Resettlement
• 4 Involuntary Resettlement, Human Capital, and Economic Development
• 5 Resettlement Planning in the Brazilian Power Sector: Recent Changes in Approach
• 6 Resettlement After Involuntary Displacement: The Karelians in Finland
• 7 The Yacyretá Experience with Urban Resettlement: Some Lessons and Insights
• 8 Resettlement in Ghana: From Akosombo to Kpong
• 9 The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute and Navajo Relocation
• 10 Peasants, Planners, and Participation: Resettlement in Mexico
• 11 Resettlement at Manantali, Mali: Short-Term Success, Long-Term Problems
• 12 The Dynamics of Social and Economic Adaptation During Resettlement: The Case of Beles Valley in Ethiopia
• 13 Involuntary Displacement and the Changing Frontiers of Kinship: A Study of Resettlement in Orissa
• 14 Involuntary Resettlement: A Plea for the Host Population
• 15 A Spatial Analysis of Involuntary Community Relocation: A South African Case Study
• 16 Successful Involuntary Resettlement: Lessons from the Costa Rican Arenal Hydroelectric Project
• 17 Disaster-related Refugee Flows and Development-caused Population Displacement
• About the Contributors