ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at current approaches to understanding displacement and resettlement and common (policy) responses to development induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR), including through Social and Environmental Impact Assessment. Placing DIDR within the broader context of natural resource governance and resource politics, it outlines the value of power analysis and gives particular attention to processes of reterritorialization in the overall (re)shaping of DIDR processes and outcomes. Viewing development as a discourse, it presents DIDR as a product of power struggles and to a certain extent the manifestation of existing power asymmetry between powerful (e.g. international donors, national government, private developers) and less powerful actors (e.g. different groups of affected people). It links displacement and resettlement with the (re)shaping of state spaces, how the latter emerge through various forms of territorialization, and how they resemble both state’s territorialization attempt and local community’s ability to resist and/or adjust their livelihoods options and strategies through reterritorialization or territorialization from the ground up, including within state spaces.
