ABSTRACT
This chapter considers issues related to urban development-caused forced displacement and resettlement and the legal and policy approaches developed to address them to assess what difference national and international policies and guidelines have made to the outcomes of urban forced displacement. The chapter is based primarily on fieldwork in 2008–2009 in Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou, Mumbai, and Delhi and documentation from those cities and others.
Under the influence of bottom-up pressure from local constituencies and international policies and norms, many countries have developed programs, often ad hoc, to assist the displaced. Sometimes, countries, municipalities, or individual projects have modeled their interventions along their interpretations of donors’ international policies, which they are required to use when they receive full or partial funding from their agencies.
An improved paradigm for projects causing urban displacement and resettlement should include several components: (1) livelihood reconstruction and improvement, and support for maintaining or accessing jobs; (2) reconstitution of housing and neighborhood infrastructure; and (3) efforts during planning to limit displacement and its risks, the institution of accountability and grievance mechanisms, and explicit provisions for treating the legacy of unsolved problems that endure in urban projects despite existing policies and laws. The studies in the five cities for this chapter addressed reconstitution of housing and neighborhood infrastructure, regardless of the funding. Complementary efforts were addressed better in projects using international guidelines; grievance mechanisms were instituted and some projects reduced the number of displaced. However, livelihood improvement, the main stated goal of most international policies, was ignored by all projects studied and not achieved, regardless of the source of funding. Thus, most displaced people 76faced impoverished livelihoods at the places of their planned or unplanned relocation. The World Bank Environmental and Social Standards (ESS) do not outline specific strategies for urban relocation and lack guidance for rebuilding urban resettlers’ productive bases at their new locations. These omissions need to be corrected before the new ESS are finalized in 2018 and used for implementation.
