ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the assumption that well-framed legal and political institutions are the sole prerequisite from which effective rights-claiming will flow. Community responses to Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DIDR) in rural Myanmar, Jill Kavanagh forging new avenues for rights-claiming. In April 2012, residents of five villages in a remote area of eastern Myanmar where the Salween River turns west on its way to the Gulf of Martaban were informed that a newly surveyed dam site at Hat Gyi was going to necessitate their relocation and the abandonment of schools on both sides of the river. Programmatic measures undertaken by donors in the interim must not confuse informal rights-claiming strategies with political demands, nor ignore such strategies as inherently 'political'. Rather, they should capitalise on the integral role such strategies can play in securing interim recognition for rights norms in eastern Myanmar, where State institutions may remain shaky, and their enforcing role peripheral, for many years to come.
