Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement: Causes, Consequences, and Socio-Legal Context

Dr Walter Fernandes,

North Eastern Social Research Centre

From the author

The goal of economic development is not only to maximize the capital of individuals and the private sector, but also to improve the well-being of entire communities and nations. Several authors have pointed out the positive role of economic development as a tool for the democratization of economic and social relations, as well as the only possible means of uplifting the poorest communities out of poverty. Increasingly, however, economic development is resulting in large numbers of people who are socially excluded and deprived of access to resources necessary for their existence. One of the most tragic consequences of the contemporary dynamics of economic development has become the increasing number of people displaced or affected following the implementation of development projects. Several forms of forced eviction, compulsory relocation, and displacement associated with land acquisition have become common means of achieving control over a particular territory and its resources. Transformation and changes of land use have always led to problems associated with population resettlement. However, only in the twentieth century has this problem emerged on such a massive scale. The creation of large dams and hydro-plants had already been initiated in the first decades of the last century. By the twenties, this problem had become apparent in India. However, the real explosion of such problems was associated with the political transformations of the fifties and sixties: China's industrialization pursued by bloody methods (Mao's so-called Great Leap Forward policy), Nehru's socialist vision of industrialization and dams as "temples of modern India", hydro projects in the Soviet Union, and, in Africa, those related to decolonization, land acquisition, conservation of nature, and growing economic needs.

According to specialists, at least 15 million people each year are forced to leave their homes following the phenomenon known as development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR). The problem of development-caused resettlement is a global issue, with those affected including mobile indigenous people living around national parks in Africa, millions of tribal people in India, forcibly evicted inhabitants of large agglomerations in India, Africa and Latin America, and the citizens of developed states relocated following the expansion of opencast mining. Nowadays the term "development displacees" is used to describe a multi-million-strong and diverse community of victims of international development, consisting of people relocated due to the creation of dams, extraction of resources, urbanization and transformation of urban areas, population redistribution schemes, evictions in city areas, expansion of urban areas, deforestation, and finally the conservation of nature. The growing scale of involuntary resettlement is associated with the preparation of mega-events such as the Olympic Games in Beijing and the XIX Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

Development-induced displacement is currently among the most prominent categories of forced migrations, leading to significantly dangerous humanitarian consequences. The rapidly increasing scale of this problem is not accompanied by adequate interest on the part of western public opinion, or by efforts undertaken by the universal or regional international institutions dealing with human rights or the agencies providing humanitarian assistance. Despite its growing social consequences, the problem of development-induced resettlement still remains less well-known by the general public, with interest in it being limited to smaller groups of applied anthropologists or specialists in international development. Intensification of scientific research within this area should be accompanied by attempts to marshal public opinion on the situation of tens of millions victims of international development, for whom leaving the area of current residence is the beginning of a spiral of socio-economic problems, which usually are almost impossible to solve. The term "development-caused displacement" coined in recent decades by social scientists shows, to a slight extent, the risks associated with the current dynamics of economic development. Terms such as "project-induced displacement" and "investment-induced displacement" seem to be more neutral from the point of view of diverse distribution of benefits and costs of development projects.

As a result of the limited scale of such problems in the most developed countries of the world, development-caused resettlement is a little-known issue among European specialists in social sciences, even those dealing with demography, forced migrations, and international development. However, even in Europe we are still observing problems such as forced evictions within urban areas, involuntary relocations associated with the expansion of opencast mining, and a limited scale of resettlement associated with the construction of dams and hydropower plants. The aim of this book is therefore to deepen the state of research on development-induced resettlement, with particular emphasis on the humanitarian, legal and social aspects of this problem. My primary assumption was to create a book that was easy to absorb, free from difficult and detailed theoretical concepts. That is why I refrain from including in its content detailed theoretical analysis based on applied anthropology, political economy or international development. The book is particularly focused on the socio-legal analysis of the most spectacular and socially burning causes of development-induced displacement and resettlement worldwide. I draw attention to the best-known examples of development-caused resettlement across the world: the creation of Three Gorges Dam, the construction of the Sardar Sarovar complex in India, and the creation of the Aswan, Kariba and Akosombo Dams in Africa. My particular attention was also directed to the most socially burning examples of such relocations in Sudan, Nigeria, China, and Guatemala. In addition, I call attention to the lesser-known causes of development-induced resettlement such as mining, conservation of nature and voluntary resettlement schemes. The expanded chapter devoted to the examples of development-induced resettlement in Europe was included to sensitize readers from the developed countries to the fact that development resettlements are not an exotic issue, characteristic only of tribal communities in Africa and Asia, but are also a socio-economic phenomenon currently observed in our own vicinity. The book is addressed to an assumed readership comprising a broad circle of academics: political economists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, demographers, specialists in political sciences and international development, human rights activists, and ecologists. Because of the general and accessible character of this book, it may prove useful for any other persons wishing to understand the social determinants of contemporary international development and the problems of people for whom the word "development" is associated with being kicked out of their current homes, lands and resources.

The analyses presented in this book are based on a combination of two concepts: displacement and resettlement. The first is the socio-economic phenomenon associated with being cut off from resources or their significant reduction. The second is focused on the long-term process of change of the place of residence and progressive adaptation to new realities. The book points out the autonomous nature of displacement and resettlement, while paying attention to their creative role as factors contributing to wider socio-economic changes. The book, as one of the very few publications of this type, draws attention to the strong relationship of DIDR with the problem of forced evictions implemented in many developing and developed states.

Introduction—a brief overview of contemporary involuntary migrations

Contemporary studies on forced human mobility are based on three distinct and very different systems of analysis. They are distinguished not only by different conceptual grids but also by their origins and objectives. Each of these theoretical regimes describe migration differently. Migration studies have primarily pointed out the demographic aspects of population mobility and its further economic and social consequences. The nature of refugee studies is significantly determined by the provisions of international conventions adopted within the UN system a dozen years ago. However, many areas of contemporary refugee studies are not limited to legal analysis but include a significantly wider range of sociological and political considerations. Nevertheless the provisions of refugee conventions provide the general legal framework of reference in this discipline. Research on internal displacement represents the youngest system of analysis of forced internal mobility.

Traditionally understood, migration studies are the oldest system of analysis of human spatial mobility. They were created in the late nineteenth century on the basis of economy, geography and historical demography. Research into evolution, investigations of the decline of ancient empires, and geographical determinism had a large impact on the foundations of migration studies. In later decades, migration studies, however, developed primarily on the basis of economics, with their main area of research being the analysis of the determinants of voluntary human mobility. A German-English geographer, Ernst Georg Ravenstein (1834–1913), is considered the founder of contemporary migration studies. Already in the classic publication entitled The Laws of Migration, published in two volumes in 1885 and 1889, Ravenstein wrote that "bad or oppressive laws, heavy taxation and unattractive climate, uncongenial social surroundings, and even compulsion (slave trade, transportation) produce flows of migrants, but none of these flows can be compared in volume with that which arises from the desire inherent in the most men to 'better' themselves in material aspects". The primacy of economic categories established by Ravenstein strongly dominated the study of migration throughout the twentieth century and persists to this day. Almost all influential migration theories, such as neoclassical theories, the Hicks model (1932), the Harris-Todaro model (1970), Wilbur Zelinsky's mobility transition model, or the push-pull theory of Everett Lee (1966), are based on economic categories. Unfortunately, narrowing human migration to economic motivations alone omits many relevant and immeasurable social aspects, not to mention environmental and climate determinants which were completely marginalized by migration theorists for almost the whole of the twentieth century. According to some specialists, the marginalization of environmental factors within migration theories was associated with Marxist dialectical materialism, which strongly influences social sciences in democratic as well as communist countries. The impact of labour migrations on economic growth was one of the fundamental themes of migration studies. However, this discipline through most of the last century completely marginalized the factor of development policy as it shaped forced migrations. Given the crucial importance of economic factors, contemporary migration studies can play only a limited and subsidiary role in the more advanced research on involuntary mobility. In recent years we have observed attempts to conceptualize forced migration studies as an autonomous part of migration studies. However, it seems that the scope of these studies, proposed inter alia in the IASFM definition, is too broad in nature and does not produce good conditions for detailed research. The International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) describes its subject as a "term that refers to the movements of refugees and internally displaced people (those displaced by conflicts) as well as people displaced by natural or environmental disasters, chemical or nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects". The attempt to connect analysis of issues very different from each other, such as internal displacement and involuntary resettlement, human trafficking, and forced international migration, within a single concept of forced migration seems unpromising. Because of its relatively short history and theoretical weakness, the study of forced migrations does not seem to be a valuable complement to studies of voluntary economic migrations. It seems that better conditions for detailed research have created the displacement studies developed in recent years.

The second regime of analysis of involuntary human mobility, developed in the early and mid twentieth century on the basis of politics and law, is that dealing with the category of refugees. Unlike the subjects of migration studies bounded by demographics and economics, the refugee occupies a primarily legal category, providing the basis for institutional systems of protection. From the very beginning the category of refugees was strongly associated with the institution of asylum. The first formal efforts for refugee protection are associated with the Fridtjof Nansen activities at the end of the First World War. Until the early fifties, protection of refugees was not a universal concept, but was developed as a response to current political problems in order to help certain categories of people forced to leave their countries of origin. We can mention two refugee conventions adopted during the thirties: the Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees, 28 October 1933, and the Convention Concerning the Status of Refugees Coming from Germany, 10 February 1938. Practical activities, accompanied by legal documents, which were undertaken during the twenties and thirties were directed towards specific groups in need. The refugee protection system known in the twenties and thirties consisted of rather ad hoc legal mechanisms to allow swift help to well-defined categories of persecuted minorities. The origin of the international protection of refugees as a universal concept was associated with the adoption of the Geneva Convention in 1951, the creation of the UNHCR in 1950, and the signing of the so-called New York Protocol in 1967. Both of these international legal instruments as well as the UN system of humanitarian practice limited the category of refugees to international migrants forced to leave their country of origin or previous residence for political reasons, especially armed conflict, political persecution and organised violence. According to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (CRSR), a refugee is defined as a person who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country or return there because there is a fear of persecution". The legal understanding of refugee protection is also strongly connected with well-regulated categories of statelessness and asylum within the frameworks of public international law. In addition, public international law includes documents related to the protection of voluntary international economic migrants (migrant workers). I am thinking in particular of the United Nations International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which was adopted in 1990 and entered into force in 2003. Due to the lack of acceptance of its provisions by western countries, the importance of this document and its implementation, as monitored by Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW), is very limited. The ILO has adopted two international conventions concerning migrant workers (Conventions No. 97 and No. 143). Similar documents were adopted by the Council of Europe (COE).

The third category of interpretation of involuntary mobility is that of internal displacement. The term "displaced persons" was coined by Russian-American sociologist Eugene M. Kulischer (1881–1956), the author of The Displacement of Population in Europe (Montreal, 1943). Kulischer applies this term to all categories of forced mobility in Europe during the war. The contemporary understanding of this term, therefore, significantly differs from its actual meaning, which is limited mostly to cases of forced internal mobility[1]. The end of the Second World War, bringing in the formative period of the Iron Curtain, did not lead to significant interest in internal displacement. Scientific research into displacement and resettlement was limited to issues relating to the social consequences of economic development in parts of the world considered peripheral, in terms of geopolitical rivalry. Politically conditioned processes of decolonization launched many policies resulting in forced internal migrations. In 1945 American sociologist and psychiatrist Alexander H. Leighton published the book entitled The governing of men: General principles and recommendations based on experience at a Japanese relocation camp- a pioneering study on psychological and social aspects of forced relocations. Among the first studies on the social consequences of development-induced displacement and resettlement we can mention the works of applied anthropologists such as Elizabeth Colson, Thayer Scudder and Robert Fernea. Studies of development-induced displacement had already emerged in the mid-fifties and early sixties, in the context of such projects as the Great Dam of Aswan, the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi and the Akosombo Dam on Lake Volta in Ghana. During the fifties and sixties we also observed the development of anthropological studies of resettlement in other parts of the world[2]. Important studies on the socio-economic impact of dams were also conducted by David Brokensha, David Butcher and Robert Chambers. The first extensive studies devoted to urban relocation in developed countries can be dated back to the sixties. I am thinking of studies on urban relocation in Boston undertaken in the early sixties by American sociologist Herbert Gans. He closely examined how the transformation of the Boston urban space has led to displacement of the members of Italian community. The first more advanced considerations of forced migrations caused by long-term environmental disruptions can be dated back to the nineteen-seventies. The problem of demographic pressure caused by environmental problems and declining resources had been briefly analyzed in the forties in the context of the Dust Bowl or the problem of overpopulation (for example, in the book Road to Survival by American ecologist William Vogt). Only in the seventies was research in this area based on more advanced scientific investigation and linked to the activity of international institutions such as UNEP. It was then noted that long-term natural disasters such as cyclones in Bangladesh and drought in the Sahel region had a strong influence on the dynamics of internal and transnational forced migration in those regions. Attention was also paid to the impact of population growth and the effect of natural disasters in terms of declining resources in the most populated countries of Asia. According to some experts connected with so-called Neomalthusianism, overpopulation and diminishing resources could lead to the forced migration of tens of millions of people in the most densely populated countries, who were vulnerable to the consequences of natural disasters and long-term environmental changes such as sea level rise. This problem had been pointed out in the seventies by Lester Brown, American environmentalist and founder of the Worldwatch Institute. The seventies were also a decade of increased attention to development-caused involuntary resettlement, inter alia among applied anthropologists and sociologists cooperating with the analytical structures of the World Bank. Its efforts led to the adaptation in 1980 of the first World Bank guidelines devoted to planning and implementation of involuntary resettlement. When analyzing the practical sphere of assistance and protection of displaced people it is worth noting the UNHCR activities initiated in the first half of the seventies. Despite the lack of formal mandate for activity in this area, the agency has acted to protect people internally displaced by armed conflicts and natural disasters in Asia.

The studies on internal displacement conducted in the seventies therefore had a selective character. It was only in the following years that the first attempts to conceptualize the issue on a more advanced scientific basis could be noted. The 44-page UNEP report "Environmental Refugees" issued in 1985 by Professor Essam El-Hinnawi is considered the first attempt at a broad conceptualization of forced migrations caused by environmental factor[3]. El-Hinnawi outlines the major elements of environmentally-conditioned migration, and presents the first definition of people he called "environmental refugees". According to El-Hinnawi, environmental refugees are "those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life". Despite its limited usefulness for more detailed theoretical considerations, this concept played an important role as the starting point of scientific consideration of the issue. In 1980 the first World Bank guidelines of involuntary resettlement were adopted. The first half of the eighties was another period of rapid development of studies on development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR). The volume Putting people first: sociological variables in rural development edited by Michael M. Cernea and published by the World Bank has played an important role as the initiator of more advanced studies in this area. It was in the mid and late eighties that the term "development-induced displacement and resettlement" (DIDR) first started to appear in scientific publications. The collapse of the bipolar international order and release of many hitherto blocked ethnic antagonisms laid the groundwork for research on issues of conflict-induced displacement. Analytical studies in that category were so significant that for at least a few years they dominated the overall picture of internal displacement. The term "conflict-induced displacement" was coined and slowly popularized in literature on forced migrations during the nineties. The growing number of people internally displaced as a result of armed conflict and massive violence prompted the adoption of the Guiding Principles of Internal Displacement in 1998, as well as local documents on IDP protection and assistance and regional stability in Africa (the so-called Great Lakes Pact and Convention of Kampala) in recent years.

During the last two decades we have witnessed a very dynamic development of studies on internal displacement. This problem has for the first time become a subject of debate within international institutions and agencies, including these of humanitarian profile such as the UNHCR and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Of key importance, of course, were activities related to conflict-induced displacement. This term appeared in the scientific literature in the first half of the nineties. Equally dynamic during the nineties was the growth in analysis of development-induced displacement and resettlement. This trend emerged from debates about the social consequences of dam megaprojects implemented in China (Three Gorges Dam) and India (Sardar Sarovar Complex on the Narmada River). Much attention has been paid to this issue within the framework of the World Bank analytical units, which resulted in the adoption of Operational Directive 4.30 (OD 4.30) in 1990 and Operational Policy 4.12 (OP 4.12) on involuntary resettlement in December 2001. The last decade was also a period of rapid development of research devoted to internal displacement due to environmental disruptions. The legally dubious and excessively alarming term "environmental refugees" has been replaced by the more suitable category of "environmentally-induced displacement people" and "forced environmental migrants". An important direction taken by research has been the study of environmentally-induced displacement in the context of security risks. Among the authors in the field of security whose analyses play a particularly important role in the development of this issue we should mention Astri Suhrke, Thomas Homer-Dixon and Arthur H. Westing[4]. Astri Suhrke's 1993 paper entitled "Pressure Points: Environmental Degradation, Migration and Conflict" marked the highly important entrance of research on the destabilizing effects of environmental disruption and its relation to conflict and forced migrations. Suhrke pointed out the impact of environmental degradation and the associated industrialization on the diversified dynamics of spatial mobility. The growing dynamics of industrialization at the same time becomes a cause of economic migrations of new residents and environmentally-induced displacement or development-induced displacement of its native communities. Also other categories of development projects can play a role of both a cause of relocation and a factor contributing to the increasing dynamics of economic migration. In Peruvian Andes: mining extraction at the same time become a cause of involuntary resettlement and the factor contributing to the significant change of local, regional and transnational voluntary migration patterns[5]. It is also worth mentioning an article by Arthur H. Westing entitled "Environmental Refugees: A Growing Category of Displaced Persons", published in 1992.