Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement

Risks, Impoverishment, Legacies, Solutions

Michael M. Cernea, Julie K. Maldonado

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138060517
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351670067
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Property Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Development-caused forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) is a critical problem on the international development agenda. The frequency of forced displacements is rapidly increasing, the sheer numbers of uprooted and impoverished people reveal fast accelerating trends, whilst government reporting remains poor and misleading. Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement analyzes widespread impoverishment outcomes, ?risks to human rights, and other adverse impacts of displacement; it documents under-compensation of expropriated people, critiques cost externalization on resettlers, and points a laser light on the absence of protective, robust, and binding legal frameworks in the overwhelming majority of developing countries.

In response, this book proposes constructive solutions to improve quality and measure the outcomes of forced resettlement, prevent the mass-manufacturing of new poverty, promote social justice, and respect human rights. It also advocates for the reparation of bad legacies left behind by failed resettlement. It brings together? prominent scholars and practitioners from several countries who argue that states, development agencies, and private sector corporations which trigger displacements must adopt a "resettlement with development" paradigm. Towards this end, the book's co-authors translate cutting edge research into legal, economic, financial, policy, and pragmatic operational recommendations. An inspiring and compelling guide to the field, Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement will be of interest to university faculty, government officials, private corporations, researchers, ?and students in anthropology,? economics,? sociology, law, political science, human geography, and international development.

1

Challenging the prevailing paradigm of displacement and resettlement

Its evolution, and constructive ways of improving it

Michael M. Cernea and Julie K. Maldonado

Abstract

This volume’s introductory chapter begins with an overview on how the world’s first ever policy on development-caused forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR), adopted in February 1980 by the World Bank, has been gradually embraced on a worldwide scale. The progress of the policy took place along two simultaneous “itineraries”: depth (of content) and breadth (of geographic coverage).

The first itinerary was the (still insufficiently known) step-wise twenty-year advance in strengthening and enriching this pioneering policy with new knowledge, distilled from both scholarly research and on-the ground practice (successes and failures) in Bank-financed projects. The second itinerary is the DFDR policy’s geographic propagation outside the World Bank along six international “tracks” through the policy’s adoption by numerous other aid agencies, 80 large private sector commercial banks, and by some developing countries’ governments, up to the recent World Bank replacement of the Safeguard Policies with standards proposed to the borrowing countries, a change that is analyzed critically in this volume. The analysis is supported by a review of quantified data about the magnitude and accelerating displacement trends in the portfolio of World Bank projects that include DFDR processes, and about major failures in reconstructing livelihoods. The last part of the introductory chapter offers a synopsis of this book’s 13 chapters by researchers from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Australia, Europe, and North America.

Introduction

The present volume examines a complex, multivariable, and internally contradictory social-economic process known widely as development-caused forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR). Over the last three decades, this process has become more visible publicly, more investigated and empirically documented by social scientists, and more resisted by the affected and targeted populations. Nonetheless, forced displacement processes are expanding, compounding harmful economic pauperization and cultural impacts.

Themes and premises of this volume

This book’s co-authors come to this collective effort from six continents and from various cultures, bringing together new thoughts and new data. The book’s chapters are convergent in their analyses and advocacy. The authors report on courageous innovations and improved practices being tested in some countries that could be generalized. They also reveal, analyze, and criticize numerous dysfunctional approaches and unacceptable outcomes of ill-treated DFDR processes.

As this book’s title states, we are challenging the policy paradigm currently embodied in the design, content, and methodology of numerous projects causing involuntary resettlement. The prevailing paradigm suffers from a substantial knowledge deficit: it has fallen behind the progress in research-based knowledge about involuntary resettlement achieved during the last two decades. We are challenging not only the knowledge deficit revealed in these projects, but also situations in which even much of what is valuable and correct in the existing policy paradigm(s) is distorted by poor implementation. One example is the chronic under-allocation of resources to resettlement action plans (RAPs) designed without an economic feasibility analysis apt to confirm their soundness. Without such economic and financial feasibility analyses, such a “plan” is more a piece of wishful thinking than a realistic plan.

What also weakens the existing policy paradigm, and is explicitly challenged in this book, is the inadequacy or absence in most developing countries of legislation able to protect the rights and just entitlements of displaced people. To exemplify with the most frequent situation, we know from universally confirmed evidence that when legislation mandates displacement yet doesn’t mandate also the economic and social reconstruction needed after forced displacement, the inherent riskiness of the DFDR process results in additional poverty and human tragedy. Unfortunately, this delinking persists today in many developing countries and leads to failures and impoverishment. Throughout this volume, we argue that this structural delinking is determined and inbuilt by the one-sided laws for land acquisition prevailing in many developing countries. These laws are one-sided since they are predicated exclusively on acquisition by expropriation and uprooting, but do not include any provision requiring the state, as expropriating agent, to also ensure the resettlement and reconstruction that are indispensable after displacement (a recent example is Bangladesh’s 2017 new and incomplete law on land acquisition, see Zaman and Khatun 2018).

Consequently, such legislation must today be treated as obsolete and in need of radical overhaul: each land acquisition law that permits expropriation must also include mandatory support for the social-economic recovery of the population displaced by supplementing compensation with investments in re-development (Cernea 2008). It is highly significant that in 2013 India undertook precisely such a radical overhaul: it finally abolished its 125-year-old colonial land acquisition law, but had no provision for reconstructing the livelihood of the dispossessed and uprooted families. The title of the new Act explicitly captures this new legal content, The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (GOI 2013). With this step, India historically transcended its obselete legal paradigm.

From among the constitutive elements of the paradigm for sustainable resettlement, this book has elected to emphasize those highlighted in the book’s subtitle: risks, impoverishment, legacies, and solutions. This choice is deliberate because the risks of impoverishment and of unsolved lingering legacies are causally traceable to forced expropriation and physical uprooting. Along this line, we examine the growing set of injustices, abuses, and human rights violations experienced by people forcibly displaced. We aspire to contribute to the formulation of a new paradigm that is inclusive of the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of sound resettlement and is grounded in the recognition and protection of human rights. We envisage this paradigm to be defined as “resettlement with development,” substantially different and opposed to “resettlement with compensation only” which most often is “resettlement with impoverishment.” Moving towards this paradigm is not easy, yet this is the paradigm consistent with poverty elimination and just development.

As researchers we are particularly pleased to report on approaches that represent innovations – some presented here in detail for the first time – in the social science literature on DFDR. When such innovations are recognized as valuable, they need to be introduced in the states’ legislation for resettlement. With the power of social science research, argument, and advocacy, the volume’s co-authors aim to inform state governments, development agencies, and the public at large about ways to prevent, reduce, control, and influence the unfolding of DFDR through better understanding, more knowledge, strong legal normative systems, reorientation of state and development agencies’ actions, and increased financial investments for reconstruction post-displacement. We hope that some of these facts and their documented accounts will become part of the conversation between researchers and practitioners.

The present book is being produced shortly after the large international debate about Safeguard Policies in development, a debate started by the World Bank in the course of the revision of its Safeguard Policies. This overall exercise resulted, in fact, in the World Bank’s elimination of its Safeguard Policies qua policies and their replacement with two new World Bank documents, released in August 2016: the Bank’s Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) and the Environment and Social Standards (ESS) (World Bank 2017a). During and due to this international debate, the worldwide visibility of DFDR issues has significantly increased (World Bank 2017a).¹

In their chapters, this book’s co-authors challenge the overall adequacy of the Bank’s ESF and ESS as a replacement for the Safeguard Policies, because this “replacement” is vastly weakening the protection of people and the environment adversely affected by development. Yet the main subject of this book is not the totality of the ESF and ESS package. The central focus of this book is the DFDR process. The ESS document addresses the DFDR in its Standard Number (Nr.) 5, titled “Land acquisition, restrictions on land use, and involuntary resettlement.” We analyze how the crucial DFDR issues are treated in the Standard Nr. 5 of the ESS, compared to their previous treatment by the former Safeguard Policy on resettlement.

Public feedback has been sharply, though not unanimously,² critical of the de-ranking of the World Bank’s Safeguard Policies from their former status as policies to “standards” binding for borrowers but not binding on the Bank itself.

In this introductory chapter, we attempt to outline the magnitude and accelerating trends among the ongoing DFDR processes. Then, since the ongoing debate on DFDR is centered on the policy paradigm and normative systems needed for managing these processes, this introductory chapter provides a background retrospective on why and how the first policy paradigm on DFDR was formulated at the World Bank, then was iteratively improved in several updating stages, and subsequently produced a successful and very wide “ripple effect” at the international scale (Cernea 2005). Further, the chapter documents with authoritative statistics the typical performance problems confronted today in DFDR processes, relying on data made recently available by the World Bank regarding the loss of income and livelihood suffered by people displaced under a large number of World Bank-financed projects. The advances achieved due to the Bank’s landmark policy on DFDR are now endangered because a distinct resettlement policy is now absent from the new “World Bank Environmental and Social Framework for Investment Financing” (World Bank 2017a, 9–22), while the resettlement issues are present only ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Contributors’ biographies
• Acknowledgments
• List of acronyms
• 1 Challenging the prevailing paradigm of displacement and resettlement: Its evolution, and constructive ways of improving it
• Part I The livelihood risks and impacts of forced displacement and resettlement
• Part II Crafting solutionsResettlement legislation, ethics, and accountability
• Index