Displacement, resettlement, and livelihood

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Development in Practice

ISSN: 0961-4524 (Print) 1364-9213 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdip20

Displacement, resettlement, and livelihood restoration: safeguard standards in practice Asmita Kabra To cite this article: Asmita Kabra (2018) Displacement, resettlement, and livelihood restoration: safeguard standards in practice, Development in Practice, 28:2, 269-279 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2018.1418296

Published online: 20 Feb 2018.

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DEVELOPMENT IN PRACTICE, 2018 VOL. 28, NO. 2, 269–279 https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2018.1418296

Displacement, resettlement, and livelihood restoration: safeguard standards in practice Asmita Kabra ABSTRACT

ARTICLE HISTORY

This article presents a case study of development practice based on the author’s experience of designing a livelihood restoration plan and monitoring its implementation. The plan was based on safeguard standards of a multilateral development bank that funded a private sector renewable energy project on land belonging to a vulnerable community in Central India. Illustrating the challenges faced in implementing and monitoring this plan and the reasons for its failure, the article argues that a complex set of institutional and individual relationships determine the way in which safeguard policies are translated into practice by diverse and interrelated actors.

Received 10 June 2017 Accepted 6 September 2017 KEYWORDS

Aid – Accountability, Development policies; Governance and public policy; Conflict and reconstruction – Forced displacement; Labour and livelihoods; South Asia

Cet article présente une étude de cas sur les pratiques du développement, basée sur l’expérience de son auteur dans la conception d’un plan de restauration des moyens de subsistance et le suivi de sa mise en œuvre. Ce plan était fondé sur les normes de sauvegarde d’une banque multilatérale de développement qui finançait un projet privé d’énergie renouvelable, situé sur des terres appartenant à une communauté vulnérable du centre de l’Inde. Illustrant les difficultés rencontrées dans la mise en œuvre, le suivi de ce plan et les raisons de son échec, l’article soutient qu’un ensemble complexe de relations institutionnelles et individuelles détermine la manière dont les politiques de sauvegarde sont traduites dans la pratique par divers acteurs liés entre eux. El presente artículo da cuenta de un estudio de caso que abordó las prácticas de desarrollo a partir de la experiencia que la autora obtuvo al elaborar un plan de restauración de medios de vida y participar en el monitoreo de su implementación. Dicho plan se fundamentó en normas de salvaguardia establecidas por un banco multilateral de desarrollo que financió un proyecto en materia de energía renovable en tierras propiedad de una comunidad vulnerable de India Central, impulsado por el sector privado. Tras ilustrar los retos surgidos de la implementación y el monitoreo del plan, así como los motivos de su fracaso, el artículo sostiene que la manera en que las normas de salvaguardia son puestas en práctica por actores diversos e interrelacionados es determinada por un conjunto complejo de relaciones institucionales e individuales.

Introduction The development of large-scale infrastructure projects invariably results in exclusion of traditional users from ownership of or access to land and natural resources. The negative livelihood impacts and socio-political marginalisation caused by involuntary displacement, especially in the Global CONTACT Asmita Kabra

[email protected]

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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South, has resulted in rising incidence of land-related conflicts (Chakravorty 2013; Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011). A global consensus has emerged in the past two decades on the need for adequate compensation to people whose land is acquired for infrastructure projects, causing adverse impacts on their livelihoods (Cernea and Mathur 2008). Multilateral development banks (MDBs) financing large-scale infrastructure projects have created a complex regime of laws, policies, and guidelines to safeguard the interests of people affected adversely due to exclusion from land (Neef and Singer 2015; Vanclay 2017). While this regime is constantly being refined, globally the outcomes of resettlement and livelihood restoration practices have consistently fallen short of expectations (Smyth et al. 2015). Land acquisition and resettlement are governed by a complex matrix of laws and policies operating at multiple levels – sector-specific, national, and international. In projects funded by MDBs, the picture is even more complex. MDBs impose strict safeguards on grant recipients that often override national laws and policies and insist on mitigation of adverse environmental and social impacts. All major MDBs (including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the African Development Bank) have, in the past two decades, developed and refined a set of fairly robust safeguard policies to mitigate negative environmental and social impacts and risks associated with large infrastructure projects. Project proponents are required to comply with multiple laws, policy safeguards and “best practices”, with the ambitious goal of not just mitigating livelihood risks, but actively promoting sustainable livelihoods and benefit sharing (Cernea and Mathur 2008). However, not all safeguard policies are implemented and monitored with equal fidelity. Variations in implementation effectiveness arise due to several reasons. One is the conflicting timeframe of infrastructure development (usually immediate and short term) and resettlement planning and implementation (that requires a longer period) (deWet 2001). Locale-specific factors, including differences in efficacy of institutional structures, power differentials, funding, and the interests/intent of individual actors involved also create diversity in effectiveness. It has been argued that development practice is not driven by development policy as much as the institutional cultures of organisations and the complex relationships between the actors involved in implementation (Mosse 2004). In the last two decades, a plethora of institutions, including government and NGOs, private consultancy firms and a large global community of independent experts, scholars and practitioners has emerged to enable the smooth implementation of safeguard policies. Sector-specific and thematic specialisations cater to increasingly stringent requirements of appraisal, reporting, and implementation of environmental and social safeguard policies and mitigation strategies. However, when safeguard policies are translated into development practice, the involvement of multiple agencies can also create divergent agendas and interests. This may in part be due to ontological and epistemological differences between different experts and specialists, who bring their specific disciplinary traditions, concerns, and practices to the project (Scott 1999). This is observed quite often in the interactions between engineers, financiers, hydrologists, ecologists, bureaucrats, and other technomanagerial experts on the one hand and social workers, activists, and social scientists on the other (Dwivedi 2002). Within each domain of expertise, the presence of multiple layers and diverse interests can result in complex development practices. For instance, within the MDBs, there is a distinct disconnect between the interests and inclinations of managers in charge of “moving the money” and securing projects, and those in charge of implementing safeguards. A recent internal audit report of the World Bank brought out in startling detail the apathy within the Bank’s project staff towards implementing their own safeguard policies (Diagne 2016). Similarly, the incentives and constraints of managers at an infrastructure company’s head office may differ widely from those of field-level managers. Often, the latter are drawn from very different socio-economic and educational backgrounds, and may respond to vastly different social norms and realities compared to the former (Chatterjee 2008). Moreover, even field actors – including local bureaucrats, project managers, local power brokers, and project-affected households – are stratified in terms of power, cultural capital, and privilege, resulting in significant “vertical politics” at the local level (Pattenden 2005). The implementation of black-and-

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white law/policy safeguards in this complicated matrix invariably results in diverse and often unexpected livelihood outcomes (Connell 2015). Some of these may undermine the very spirit behind the safeguard policies, or cause uneven impacts due to variable access to safety nets provided by safeguard policies. In view of these issues and debates, this article uses case study methodology and the author’s personal experience of designing and monitoring a livelihood restoration plan to explore the link between development policies, practice, and outcomes. I was employed as an expert between 2013 and 2015 by an MDB that was funding a renewable energy project in central India and asked to develop a livelihood restoration plan (LRP) for vulnerable families who lost agricultural land to this project. The LRP was expected to conform to global guidelines and best practices of resettlement and rehabilitation. The next section sets out the broad contours of the framework through which I and my colleagues developed the LRP and the monitoring plan. This framework was developed based on my experience working in semi-arid areas of central India. The following section describes how the company implemented the LRP and the reasons behind its failure to meet the targets set by the LRP. Through a detailed assessment of the process as well as outcomes of the LRP, the article concludes with some comments on the fraught relationship between larger development policies and the day-to-day imperatives and challenges of development practice. The key question in this article resonates with one that Mosse (2004) posed in his provocatively titled paper, “Is good policy unimplementable?”

Learning from the field: livelihood restoration planning for vulnerable rural households in semi-arid regions In 2012, a private company established a renewable energy plant in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh with financial support from a MDB. The company acquired around 30 hectares of private land and 75 hectares of government land for the project. An environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) was carried out on-site in 2013 by a New Delhi-based consultancy firm. The ESIA report adjudged that the establishment of the power plant would not have any significant resettlement and rehabilitation issues, because there was no commercial or residential use of the land proposed for the project. The project area lies in the semi-arid tropical zone of central India, with low rainfall and a predominance of low-productivity rain-fed agriculture. Such landscapes are particularly favoured for renewable energy projects, because large tracts of revenue land classified by the government as “uncultivable wastelands” are easily available for long-term lease. However, the project was assessed to have significant impact on 16 Scheduled Caste (SC) families residing in an adjacent village, but who had agricultural land in the project area.1 The project was assessed to be creating livelihood displacement for these 16 families. Three of the project-affected titleholder (PAT) families were headed by women. The quantum of land lost by the PATs ranged from 0.73 hectares to 5.87 hectares, placing them in the small or marginal farmer categories. The annual household incomes of the PATs were estimated by the ESIA consultants as ranging from INR 20,000 to INR 100,000 (US $155 to 310) per annum, or well below a dollar a day. Thus, according to social, economic, and gender-based criteria, these SC households were adjudged as highly vulnerable. This triggered the safeguard policies relating to land acquisition and involuntary resettlement of the MDB that financed the project. The company was required to compensate the titleholders for loss of land by developing and implementing a livelihood restoration plan. A key official in the safeguards division of the MDB assigned the task of developing the LRP to an NGO that I founded in 1999 and continue to lead. I was expected to create a robust resettlement plan based on my experience as an academic and development practitioner specialising in rural livelihoods in the rain-fed semi-arid tropics. In order to ensure that the company complied fully with the safeguard policy, the MDB safeguards specialist also assigned the task of monitoring and assessing the implementation of the LRP to me. The company was not given the option of choosing an

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organisation through a competitive bidding process, although this key fact probably is not reflected in the project’s formal documentation. I speculate that this would also have involved a negotiated compromise within the MDB between the finance and safeguards divisions. Thus I and my colleagues had significant leverage in designing the LRP, and this was evident in my interactions with the company’s management during the contract. Since my organisation is a nonprofit NGO, and my own livelihood security is not dependent on a sustained availability of consultancy projects, this gave us greater leverage in negotiating the LRP for the vulnerable SC families. This was possibly part of the reason why the MDB’s safeguards officer chose to involve me in the LRP process, since he wished to secure a favourable outcome for the SC households without jeopardising his own position in the MDB. We eventually entered into a formal agreement with the company in 2012, under the terms of which the implementation of the LRP was to be carried out under our supervision by a specialised team appointed by the company. The LRP’s goal was to create sustainable alternative livelihoods for the PATs, in order to prevent impoverishment because of loss of land. The process of formulation and implementation of the LRP was required to be transparent, consistent, equitable, and fully compliant with the safeguard policy of the MDB. The LRP exercise was based on five insights about rural livelihoods among vulnerable communities in semi-arid regions of the Global South which are now well-documented in the livelihoods research and agrarian studies literature. First, the poorest households in such regions follow a diversification-based livelihood strategy, since each individual livelihood option is characterised by high risks and low returns, which in turn vary from season to season and year to year (Ellis 1998). Second, household decision-making under risk and uncertainty is complex, sequential, and adaptive, and is aimed at maximising food security and cash flows through optimal allocation of household assets and labour (Mortimore 1998). Third, households leverage their social networks to obtain access to various private and social assets that can be converted to cash income and food security (Ribot and Peluso 2003). Fourth, the livelihood trajectory of a household is determined by its access to livelihood opportunities, which in turn is governed by social relations, institutions, and existing power structures (de Haan and Zoomers 2005). Lastly, households at the bottom of the local power hierarchy use a combination of everyday resistance and negotiation strategies to engage with powerful state and non-state actors (Kerkvliet 2009; Mamonova 2015). Keeping these insights in mind, we used a participatory mixed-methods approach to prepare the LRP. After a preliminary site visit, we carried out several rounds of discussions with key informants to understand local livelihoods and the regional markets and economy. We then held joint and separate in-depth consultations with different members of the PAT households to understand the intra-household power dynamics and the possibilities of conflict/collaboration. The LRP was prepared considering the specific requirements of each household and the overall social and political dynamics of livelihoods of vulnerable communities in the dryland regions of South Asia. Our LRP exercise took into account the existing livelihood portfolio of the affected families, and aimed to provide additional household income without compromising on their existing opportunities. We wanted to maximise the linkages of the proposed new activities in our LRP with their existing livelihood portfolio, labour availability, and skills, and to dovetail it with the existing seasonal pattern of their portfolio. We also wanted to minimise the risks associated with the proposed new livelihood activities, and were committed to taking our cue from the affected families about where they could build on their existing portfolios and where they were willing to foray into a new area involving some risk. We were especially mindful of intra-community dynamics that could affect the success of livelihood interventions, which include caste, social networks, and gender considerations. Given this understanding, we developed nine parameters on the basis of which livelihood interventions were to be designed for each household. These included: acceptability to the household, availability of skill, expected rate of return, legality, access to markets, availability of working capital and human resources, and continuity or linkage with their existing livelihoods. We mapped in detail the current household skills and livelihoods, and the LRP was designed to enable each

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household to upgrade its income in consonance with existing skills and preferences. An important innovation in our approach was to explore through in-depth interviews whether the affected families were interested in receiving compensation and developing livelihood restoration plans individually, or in pooling their resources towards a shared LRP. In such cases (typically where the designated PATs shared strong kinship ties) we created a cluster and developed the LRP at the cluster level rather than the household level. In cases where land title was in the name of elderly women, we were careful to develop livelihood options where their decision-making power was not undermined by male relatives. At the end of a series of detailed consultations with the titleholders, eight clusters were formed and a preferred livelihood activity was finalised for each cluster. The final set of activities included expansion of dairy farming (five households), expansion of existing construction business (one household), purchase of additional land for intensive agriculture (five households), establishing a welding workshop (one household), and creation of a fixed deposit in the local bank (two households). In the case of two titleholders, we found out that the local power broker deployed by the company’s field manager was a relative of these households. Since repeated attempts to meet the titleholders were unsuccessful, we were apprehensive that the broker was trying to corner the LRP benefits for himself. Therefore, we recommended to the company that the money should be placed in a fixed deposit until we were able to meet these individuals. We created a detailed monthly implementation plan for each LRP cluster, with details of human resource requirements and an activity schedule with measurable timelines, milestones, and monitoring indicators. Implementation was to be spaced over one year and carried out by a two-member team (a project leader and a project assistant) under our close supervision. The project was supposed to be monitored at two levels: monitoring of assets acquired by the households and monitoring of household income from the proposed livelihood intervention. A detailed monitoring schedule and format was created for the company’s implementing team, and it was agreed that evaluation would be based on income data made available to us at the end of 12 months. The comparison of these data with the baseline income mentioned in the ESIA report was the mutually agreed upon measure of success of the LRP.

From plan to practice: challenges of implementation The trajectory of implementation of the LRP diverged significantly from the ideas, ideals, and timelines we had created for the company. Not surprisingly, therefore, the outcomes of the LRP in terms of livelihood enhancement were also unsatisfactory. An analysis of the reasons behind these failures illuminates six key areas of tension between safeguard policies, development practice, and actual outcomes for different groups of affected people.

Incorrect/insufficient identification of project impacts and project-affected people The project resulted in loss of access to nearly 75 hectares of government-owned or “revenue” land for its traditional users. The ESIA report mentioned that this land was used extensively by the local people for grazing livestock, and the total land available for grazing would be reduced by 18% because of the project. This report also noted that livestock herders would have to travel an additional two or three kilometres each time they wish to access the remaining common land. However, it did not provide any robust estimates of the number of settled villagers or nomadic camel herders who reportedly depended on the land diverted to the project. It did not carry out any estimation of the financial magnitude of their losses. The only mitigation measure suggested in the ESIA for compensating local livestock herders was to provide short-term employment during the project construction/installation phase, and to allow local people to harvest grass from “inside the project premises”. Despite stringent safeguard policies being in place, the MDB allowed

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the company to replace long-term and secure pastoral livelihoods with temporary, short-term, and uncertain wage employment. Another glaring gap in the ESIA was with regard to estimation of loss of livelihood due to acquisition of private agricultural land. The report stated that these losses were insignificant, and based this finding on a telephone conversation with the land records officer of the district, who claimed that the land was barren. This, too, was a significant lapse that was neither picked up nor acted upon by the MDB’s safeguards division. The ESIA estimated that the project is likely to worsen water scarcity in the region and also noted that this was a significant concern articulated by the local people. The report states that the company proposed to mitigate the adverse impact on water availability by investing CSR (corporate social responsibility) funds in digging/deepening ponds near the village. Thus, while proposing to harvest groundwater systematically for the project, the only mitigation proposed was to enhance the capacity of ponds that hold surface water during the rainy season. This, too, was a gap that the MDB’s safeguard staff overlooked entirely. Given the critical role of the ESIA process in determining future mitigation measures for projectaffected people, the choice of the consultant was critical. The fact that the consultants chosen were either not competent to estimate local adverse impacts properly, or were willing to underreport these impacts, is crucial. It indicates the superior bargaining power, within the company and in the MDB, of experts in charge of the financial viability of the project compared to those responsible for its social viability. The choice of a more “tough” consultant for the LRP exercise may well have been a smokescreen to hide the fact that the bulk of people facing adverse impacts of the project had already been rendered invisible in the ESIA process.

Inadequate budgetary allocation for LRP The company justified the allocated budget for the LRP based on valuation of land lost by the titleholder households. Crucially, land value was calculated using the official rate of land transactions recorded with the land revenue authorities in the district. It is well-known that the recorded value of land transactions in India is significantly lower than the market price or replacement value of land of similar quality (Chakravorty 2013; EPW 1996; Parasuraman 1996). This placed a financial constraint on the LRP exercise from the very beginning. We were instructed that the LRP should be prepared strictly within this budget, and attempts to get this amount increased were turned down firmly. This was in gross violation of the MDB’s safeguards policy, which clearly requires land to be valued at replacement cost. The safeguards division of the MDB was clearly unable to influence its own colleagues and the company to raise the overall budget for compensating the PATs. The overall budget allotted by the company for the LRP exercise was about US$44,300, or an average expenditure of US$2,770 per household. The actual amount allocated ranged from US $1,035 to US$8,320, depending on the quantum of land loss of the household. The final amount spent by the company was lower than the budgeted amount by US$2,685. This downward revision was made in the last two months of the project, citing a calculation mistake in the original fund allocation. Four titleholders belonging to a single extended family received a lower amount than they were originally promised, while four households received a slightly higher amount compared to the original fund allocation. The rest received the amount originally allocated. In the case of one household, despite the funds having been allocated, the LRP was not implemented at all, citing non-cooperation with the project team as the reason. The company provided no explanation for this decision, nor did it specify how this unspent balance was to be used in the future.

Delays in project implementation The LRP was accepted by the MDB in September 2013, and a memorandum of understanding signed between us and the company in the same month. The target date for initiation of the LRP activities

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was October 2013, with the projected date of completion September 2014 (a year from the date of initiation). However, the company did not even appoint the project team until January 2014, despite repeated written reminders and verbal communication from us. Even after the project team was appointed, work on the LRP activities did not begin immediately. This is likely to be because the designated team members were being deployed for other project-related activities, and the LRP was not given high priority.

Ill-trained and insensitive project personnel During January to April 2014, the project manager hired by the company, instead of proceeding with the timelines and activities in the LRP, decided to revisit the entire LRP. We were asked to attend meetings with the field head office managers to discuss various doubts and objections raised by the project manager. Over the next two months, the project manager unilaterally began fresh negotiations and consultations with the titleholders, in violation of the agreement between us and the company. We pointed out these transgressions in writing to the company as well as alerting our contact person in the MDB. Following a strict warning to the company by the safeguards division of the MDB, our team was invited to the field once again by the project manager and other company officials. By this time, however, the collaborative atmosphere created by our team had been vitiated thoroughly, and the dominant mood among the titleholders was one of mistrust, frustration, and anger. Nearly all the people we spoke to in the village told us that the project manager had been harassing them continuously and asking them for a series of documents to “prove” their eligibility to receive the LRP funds.

Deviations from the original LRP Our final review showed that the activities eventually carried out by the company’s project team deviated significantly from the livelihood activities we had proposed under the LRP. For a majority of the titleholders, the carefully crafted and household-specific activities proposed under the LRP were replaced by a simple transfer of funds into fixed deposits in the local bank. The fund transfer happened towards the very end of the 12-month implementation period, and after much harassment and humiliation of the titleholders by the company’s project manager. We estimate that the actual sum transferred would generate an interest income ranging from about US$8 to US$28 per month for a maximum period of three years for a household. The company unilaterally decided that after three years, the funds in the fixed deposit will revert to the household’s bank account, and they can decide what to do with the money. This conversion of proposed livelihood restoration activities into simple cash transfer violates the fundamental principles stated in the MDB’s safeguard policies, and is unlikely to result in long-term improvement in the income-earning capacity of the households.

Local micro-politics and “intimate exclusions” The ownership rights to the private land identified by the company for the project belonged legally to 16 SC households for whom we developed the LRP. However, in our very first field visit, we found that a set of influential non-SC households from a neighbouring village had de facto control over this land, and had in fact been cultivating the land for several years. This is an example of what Pattenden (2005) refers to as “vertical politics”, and Hall, Hirsch, and Li (2011) call “intimate exclusion”. The safeguard policies of MDBs are designed to protect vulnerable project-affected people from more powerful urban, industrial, and/or international interest groups. However, exclusion and vulnerability also have a local, more intimate dimension. Within the project-affected families, power imbalances can and often do exist between vulnerable social groups and individuals (like women, indigenous people, children, the disabled, and ethnic minorities) and more powerful groups (including men

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and dominant class/caste/ethnic groups, among others) (Dwivedi 2006; Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011; Levien 2013). The micro-politics generated at the local level by projects can have a significant impact on livelihood restoration outcomes. The field situation presented a dilemma for the company officials in charge of implementing the project. The safeguard policy of the MDB specifies that compensation for land should be paid to the actual titleholders. This, however, would not have given the company actual control over the land earmarked for the project. The option of using the law to get the encroachers evicted was perceived to be too time-consuming and costly. The company officials resolved this dilemma by negotiating independent settlements with the de facto and de jure rights-holders with the help of local power brokers (Sud 2014). On the one hand, they negotiated a long-term lease agreement for the land with the SC landowners, and in return, promised them a livelihood restoration package and preference to at least one member from each SC family in employment (either directly or through contractors) during the construction and operation phases of the project. Simultaneously, the company officials brokered a deal with the non-SC encroachers for vacating the land and handing it over to the company in return for a one-time cash settlement. While the latter operation was in fact far more critical to obtaining control over the land, it did not appear at all in the formal records of the safeguards process reported to the MDB by the company. The payments made to the encroacher households were presumably factored into the actual cost of land acquisition by the company and were probably met from some other component of the project budget. However, it is highly likely that this additional expense explains the unwillingness of the company to spend any more than a minimum token amount on restoration of livelihoods of the actual titleholders. The company’s head office managers who were liaising with the MDB were mainly responsible for compliance on paper with the stringent safeguard provisions of the MDB. They took all necessary steps to demonstrate this in the written reports and documentation provided to the MDB’s safeguards team. However, both parties were fully aware that the main challenge in the field lay not in meeting the safeguard provisions for the legal landowners, but in smoothly managing the transfer of control on land from the illegal encroachers to the company. The company’s field level officers were tasked with managing the volatile political situation at the project site. This involved delicate carrot-and-stick negotiations with the encroachers, using the threat of coercive action for their eviction along with an incentive to negotiate a quick cash settlement at a mutually acceptable price. Simultaneously, they were engaged in appeasing the vulnerable SC households in order to demonstrate full compliance with the MDB’s safeguard policies, a task that was made extremely difficult for them by our insistence on meeting the safeguard standards in letter and spirit. In our interactions, we found that the local managers were desperate to minimise the expectations among the encroacher households of any further financial benefits from the company. They were acutely aware that these households will not hesitate to escalate local conflicts and on-site disruptions in order to gain further benefits from the company. In order to maintain this very delicate status quo, we were instructed to carry out our discussions with the titleholders at the office of the company in the sub-divisional headquarters (a town located at a distance from the project site). The company officials used their contacts with the local land brokers to arrange meetings between our team and the PATs when the latter visited the town for wage work or shopping. We were not allowed to make any visits to the project site during the monitoring phase of the LRP. We did get to know that in the project implementation phase, there were further skirmishes between the company and the non-SC households, but it is not clear to us how exactly the company managed these subsequent conflicts.

Conclusion In several countries in the Global South, official land records diverge significantly from the actual ownership and control of land. This results in a complicated situation where access to private as well as common land is obtained by specific individuals and/or groups through coercion, social sanctions and legal rights that grant them “powers of exclusion” over competing claimants (Hall, Hirsch,

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and Li 2011; Ribot and Peluso 2003). Land acquisition for development projects requires the ambiguities between ownership, access, and use rights to be replaced by clear property rights. This often requires a process of formal land titling or clarification of land rights, which sets in motion a series of contestations that “intensify claims to citizenship and governance” (Berry 2009). Moreover, the process of clarification of land rights and subsequent acquisition is not power-neutral. The authorities vested with the task of recognising and subsequently acquiring property rights enjoy the power to privilege and legitimise the claims of some actors over those of others (Lam and Paul 2014; Sikor and Lund 2009). Internal fractures within these authority bodies add another layer of complication to the question of who is included and whose claims are excluded. This case study reinforces the findings of the IAPA symposium on resettlement and livelihoods (Smyth et al. 2015) which identified five “big issues” for land access, resettlement, and livelihood restoration practice. Livelihood restoration is indeed falling short of its stated objectives despite improvement in global safeguard standards and convergence between standards at the international and country levels. The process of planning and implementation is riddled with loopholes, and resources allocated for livelihood restoration fall short of the funds required for making truly meaningful improvements in the livelihoods of the affected people. Through this case study, I have aimed to engage with the reasons for widespread failure of safeguard policies on the ground. I argue that the outcomes of livelihood restoration depend on how safeguard policies relate to the politics of development practice and, following Mosse (2004), that it is important to tease out the complicated linkages between development policies, practices, and outcomes. Instrumentalist approaches to bridging the gap between policy and outcome tend to focus on making “better” policies, and attempting to “bring institutional reality into line with policy prescription” (Mosse 2004). Development agencies (including governments and MDBs) have persistently tried to solve the inherently political question of exclusion from land by creating more stringent safeguard policies. They often tend to over-specify and over-anticipate on-the-ground complexities and incorporate these into the safeguard policy framework. Thus, the intent to safeguard vulnerable groups and landscapes translates into detailed guidelines on how to assess the diverse environmental, social, and economic impacts of projects on vulnerable groups. Safeguard policies typically tend to be laid out in documents running into several pages and multiple categories. Project proponents receiving MDB funds are required to demonstrate that all negative impacts have been addressed and mitigated adequately. When translated into practice, these safeguard policies generate an entire ecosystem of experts and domain specialists with their own technical language, jargon, and checklists. However, as this case study demonstrates, it may be possible to comply on paper with the safeguard standards and still completely miss out the groups that are actually affected adversely, while focusing attention of the safeguard provisions on groups that are only mildly affected. A critical view of development practice, on the other hand, rejects all possibilities of good outcomes and “takes the failure of development interventions as self-evident” (Mosse 2004). This, I believe, gives up too easily on available “learning spaces” and action-spaces (Wilson 2006) where like-minded external experts and local actors can come together to look for possible alliances and work towards a range of positive outcomes. This case study highlights the limits as well as possibilities of individual development practitioners and their allies to secure better outcomes for project-affected vulnerable groups. It shows that the actual practices of actors implementing safeguard policies and also of the “beneficiaries” at the receiving end are relational and inherently political, and tend to create diverse and unintended outcomes (Connell 2015). The actual livelihood outcomes of this project, for instance, could have been very different if the ESIA was done more competently, and if the project managers had been more open to dialogue with the consultants. Existing spaces for action within the MDB could have been expanded, and CSR funds of the project proponent could have been deployed with more careful attention to local micro-politics between vulnerable and powerful actors. Careful attention to available spaces for learning and action might allow actors located strategically in the development practice ecosystem to help vulnerable project-affected people in securing better livelihood outcomes.

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Note 1. Scheduled Castes are historically disadvantaged social groups within the Hindu caste hierarchy, recognised by the Constitution of India through the (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor Asmita Kabra is Professor and Dean at the School of Human Ecology, Ambedkar University Delhi. She gained her PhD in Economics in 2008 from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her doctoral work focused on the impact of conservation-induced displacement on the livelihood of poor and marginal Adivasi communities, and was among India’s first full-length studies of such displacement. Her research interests include human ecology, development studies, and critical agrarian studies. She works on land acquisition, conservation-induced displacement, poverty, rural livelihoods, natural resource dependence, Adivasi livelihoods, and dryland agriculture. Prof. Kabra has worked on a number of research projects, studies, and consultancies related to conservation-induced displacement in various Protected Areas in India. She combines research with a range of hands-on development projects at the grassroots level. She is one of the founder trustees of Samrakshan Trust, an NGO working for socially just conservation in India. She is also the President of Adharshila, an organisation working for meaningful education for underprivileged rural children in district Sheopur, Madhya Pradesh.

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