Resettlement Risks in a Dynamic Perspective : A Case of Southern Transport Development Project in Sri Lanka

Throughout the world, land acquisition and resettlement issues have been critical to infrastructure development projects. They not only lead to delays and additional costs in the development projects but also have negative impacts on many aspects of affected people’s lives. Therefore, social safeguard policies in international development agencies and multilateral development banks have tried to cover a broad range of resettlement risks and their mitigation measures. Scholars have proposed several models to understand the issues and to propose risk mitigation measures. Among them, Cernea’s ‘impoverishment risks and reconstruction model’ (IRR) classified the negative effects of resettlement on local residents caused by development: landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, marginalization, food insecurity, loss of access to common property resources, increased morbidity and community disarticulation. Meanwhile, IRR model has been criticized because the model fails to take account of the sequential and composite nature of risk. Dwivedi points out that risk unfolds in a complex sequence of events and there is a need to analyze risk management issues in a process based framework [ibid]. He also claims that IRR model diagnoses the problems only from the viewpoint of the planner. It does not provide the scope for affected people to define their losses or to express their opinion on displacement. This study aims to investigate the degree of each risk and its changes after displacement in Southern Transport Development Project (STDP), which was the first highway project in Sri Lanka. Morikawa tried to identify the risks the affected people faced in resettlers’ perceptions in resettlement sites using Cernea’s model. Conducting questionnaire surveys in the resettlement sites again in 2016 enabled us to see the difference from the time of his visit in 2010-11, the degree of each risk and its changes after resettlement. Our survey results show that different livelihood elements follow different recovery process. Infrastructure such as electricity and house have fairly improved while water issues have not been solved in more than 30% of the households. Many respondents answered they had bought bigger and more comfortable house than before resettlement. This lead to high satisfaction of “house” element but it sometimes ended up in their exhausting compensation and failure in life reconstruction. On the other hand, other element of living improved little and especially recovery rates of income, food and relations with relatives are quite low, implying that there might be room for improvement on resettlement policies for these elements. Job training was conducted after resettlement but many respondents answered it was not very useful for their life reconstruction. The observations from our survey call for continuous assessment of resettlement risks in infrastructure development projects, and we claim that stage-wise evaluation, management and preparation of resettlement risks are necessary