Land Access & Resettlement Insight Series Compendium EN

This Compendium consolidates a 19-part Insight Series developed by SRA to help projects successfully navigate the key steps and challenges involved in the land access and resettlement process, from project assessment and planning through negotiations and into implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

Download Insight

SRA-Land-Access-And-Resettlement-Compendium-Cover-01

Overview

In this Compendium, we demystify the land access and resettlement process by providing practical insight into key steps and challenges.

Acquiring or protecting land is a highly complicated and challenging process. Project proponents have to achieve two distinct sets of goals: on the one hand, they want to secure access as quickly, efficiently and cheaply as possible; and on the other they need to (a) be fair and transparent, (b) minimise impacts on their host communities, (c) mitigate any impacts that do occur, and (d) ideally leave their hosts better off, through appropriate resettlement, livelihood restoration and related initiatives.

The end result should be mutual gains for communities, project proponents and governments. However, achieving such mutual gains is difficult.

Often project proponents don’t know where to start or how to manage the ensuing process, mis-judge associated impacts and risks, and underestimate the effort, time and cost required.

As a result, many have faced community protests, significant delays, cost overruns, and reputational damage, not to mention generated serious impacts for affected people and communities. In a worse case scenario, resettlement mis-management can even result in project cancellation or lead to long-term impoverishment of those displaced.

When resettlement is unavoidable, it must be carefully and systematically planned from an early stage, and undertaken with the informed and active participation of those displaced and other stakeholders. This is possible, and in this Compendium we show you how.