Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 15:02:20 GMT
Reply-To: Rich Winkel <rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu>
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From: Rich Winkel <rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu>
Organization: PACH
Subject: EVICTED: THE WORLD BANK, BRITISH AID AND FORCED RESETTLEMENT (1/2)
To: Multiple recipients of list ACTIV-L <ACTIV-L@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>

/** dev.worldbank: 191.0 **/
** Topic: EVICTED!, the WB & resettlement **
** Written 12:43 PM Feb 16, 1995 by gn:ecologist in cdp:dev.worldbank **

Evicted! The World Bank, British aid and forced resettlement

Executive Summary of report by The Ecologist on the World Bank’s record on compensating the people displaced by its development projects, 16 February 1995

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In 1980, the World Bank was the first major development agency to issue a policy on forced evictions. The policy requires that displacement by Bank projects must be minimized and that everyone who is evicted should be compensated so that they regain, or improve, their previous standard of living.

At least two million people currently face forcible eviction by Bank- funded development projects—from dams to roads. Yet, as the Bank itself admits in a 1994 review, its resettlement policy is being systematically flouted by Bank staff.

At least 625,000 people were totally overlooked when Bank staff assessed the numbers being displaced by Bank-funded projects;
The Bank still has no reliable displacement figures for many World Bank projects;
Half of World Bank projects in the review period had no resettlement plans;
Less than a third of resettlement plans prioritized restoring peoples’ incomes;
The Bank can only point to one project where those displaced have regained their previous standard of living—and even this is disputed by those evicted. In most cases, incomes have fallen—sometimes by as much as 80 per cent.
People affected by displacement are often neither informed nor consulted about projects which will evict them, and resettlement needs are considered secondary to construction timetables;
The Bank admits that many projects with poor initial resettlement planning cannot now be changed to improve the prospects for people being evicted;
Only half the projects displacing more than 200 people have a resettlement budget;
Delays and cost overruns from bad resettlement planning have driven down the economic rate of return of some projects to very low levels.

Failing to account for resettlement can exaggerate a project’s effectiveness and encourage the Bank to support economically marginal projects when alternatives would have been superior.

The catalogue of abuse revealed in the Review points to serious structural faults within the Bank as an institution. The Bank’s failure to compensate people displaced by its projects is a symptom of its more general failure to implement its declared goal of poverty alleviation.

The British ODA is also at fault. It has failed to use Britain’s position as one of only five countries with its own executive director on the World Bank board to prevent British aid being spent on projects which impoverish, rather than benefit, poor people. Pressure from British NGOs, parliamentarians and concerned members of the public will be necessary to improve the record of British aid, ten percent of which—#250 million—is currently channelled through the World Bank.

EVICTED!, THE WORLD BANK, BRITISH AID AND RESETTLEMENT

In 1992, 30,000 forest dwellers and peasant settlers in Uganda were expelled without warning from a strip of land between the Kibale Forest Reserve and the Queen Elizabeth National Park. They lost most of their livestock and belongings so that a wildlife corridor could be created between the Reserve and the National Park. The expulsions took place under the Kibale Forest and Game Corridor Programme, part of the World Bank’s Forestry Rehabilitation Project which was co-financed by the European Community. Joy Ngoboka described the evictions:

We were chased out on the first day. I didn’t know anything was happening until the police ran into my compound. They all had guns. They shouted at me, told me to run. I had no chance to say anything. They came at us and we ran, they came so violently. I was frightened for the children—I had eight children with me—but we just ran off in all directions. I took my way and the children took theirs. Other people were running, panicking, even picking up the wrong children in the confusion. I lost everything. I had 31 cows and some goats and hens—20 cows were killed and the rest taken. They burned everything, even the bed and furniture and kitchen. We’re poor now.1

Every year, millions of people in the Third World are forcibly displaced to make way for dams, roads, urban redevelopment schemes, power plants, other infrastructure projects and, like Joy Ngoboka, wildlife parks. Much of the money to pay for these projects is channelled through the multilateral development banks, of which the World Bank is by far the largest. The World Bank project types which cause most displacement are; dams, accounting for 63 per cent, and transport, water supply and urban projects, for 28 per cent.2

FLOUTING THE RULES

In 1980, the World Bank became the first major development agency to issue a policy on involuntary displacement, largely in response to the resistance it encountered from people affected by its projects and because of pressure from NGOs in the North and South. Yet a recent internal review—Resettlement and Development: The Bankwide Review of Projects Involving Involuntary Resettlement 1986-1993 Q makes clear that this policy is being systematically flouted by Bank staff.

Since 1980, four basic requirements are supposed to have guided all Bank-funded projects which displace people:

Baseline surveys of affected people have to be conducted. Yet Resettlement and Development notes that only forty-four per cent of. . .projects with resettlement [from 1986 to 1993] included baseline surveys.3
A resettlement plan aiming to restore lost incomes must be in place.But almost half of all active projects involving resettlement have gone to the Board without resettlement plans prepared by Borrowers and appraised by the Bank.3
A budget for resettlement has to be included in the project. In practice, however, cost analysis and financial planning for resettlement are often inadequate and financial obligations unclear, and resettlement operations frequently suffer from lack of funds.3
Timetables for resettlement have to be coordinated with civil works construction. But explicit timetables, synchronized with civil works, were found to be missing from more than half of the ongoing projects.4

In effect, the World Bank, which claims its main objective is poverty alleviation, is displacing and further impoverishing very large numbers of poor people. Many Bank-funded evictions have involved major abuses of human rights: affected people have frequently faced intimidation, arrests, beatings and even shootings. The World Bank, by providing funds, and by its close co-operation with borrowing governments, is complicit in these violations of human rights.

SOCIETY TORN APART

The Resettlement and Development Review describes the effects of eviction as follows:

When people are forcibly moved, production systems may be dismantled, long-established residential settlements are disorganized, and kinship groups are scattered. Many jobs and assets are lost. Informal social networks that are part of daily sustenance systems—providing mutual help in childcare, food security, revenue transfers, labour exchange and other basic sources of socio-economic support—collapse because of territorial dispersion. Health care tends to deteriorate. Links between producers and their consumers are often severed, and local labour markets are disrupted. Local organizations and formal and informal associations disappear because of the sudden departure of their members, often in different directions. Traditional authority and management systems can lose leaders.
Symbolic markers, such as ancestral shrines and graves, are abandoned, breaking links with the past and with peoples’ cultural identity. Not always visible or quantifiable, these processes are nonetheless real. The cumulative effect is that the social fabric and economy are torn apart.5

Women’s lives tend to be worse disrupted than men’s:

Women are harder hit by resettlement than men since they are more likely to earn their living from small businesses located at or near their residences. Women may also be affected disproportionately in rural areas since they are more often dependent on common property resources. For example, gardens may more frequently be on unregistered land than fields owned by men.6

The problem is exacerbated by the tendency for compensation payments to be paid only to heads of households, assumed to be men, thus converting the collective assets of the family to cash in male hands, and leaving women and children at a higher risk of deprivation.7

LAST TO KNOW

Evictees are often the last to be told of development projects that will affect their communities. In many cases, they first learn of the decision when eviction notices are pinned up in their villages or when surveying teams come to examine their area. In so far as their participation is invited in the project, it is primarily with a view to ensuring their easy eviction: input that challenges the project is deemed at best unwelcome, at worst subversive.

Should they wish to challenge the project in terms that will make sense to its promoters, they must obtain—and make sense of—project documents that are often restricted, usually housed in government departments (or in the Bank’s headquarters) and invariably written in official, possibly foreign, language. Even when they can obtain the documents, the oustees must contend with political forces—from national governments and commercial interests to the Bank itself—that are highly resistant to criticism.

Those targeted for eviction are generally the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society—Rlandless labourers, tenants, urban squatters. . .cultivators with only customary tenure. . .indigenous people, ethnic minorities, pastoral groupsS—although such people gain little or nothing from World Bank projects [see Box p.4].8

Three recent examples illustrate the human suffering and impoverishment that typically result from forced relocation. All three projects were financed by the Bank.

Chandil Dam, India

In India, villagers displaced during the 1980s by the Chandil Dam, part of the Subernarekha Multipurpose Project, were placed in temporary relief camps of such squalor that one World Bank official reported back to Washington that the situation required the emergency intervention of the Red Cross. Belatedly, the Bank suspended funding for the dam in 1988, but within two years money was flowing again.
In August 1991, water in the Chandil reservoir rose to a height of 177 metres and remained there for 12 days; because dam officials refused to open the sluice gates, six villages were submerged, while many others lost all or part of their agricultural land. Crops were destroyed, wells and mud homes collapsed, a pregnant woman and her husband were drowned as they tried to save their belongings, and many others suffered sickness and impoverishment due to the submergence and inadequate relief measures. No one received warning of impending flooding. Indeed, the Project Administrator had assured one evictee delegation that their village would not face submergence at that phase in the project.9

Kedung Ombo Dam, Indonesia

The Kedung Ombo Dam required the relocation of 5,268 families from 20 villages. A majority of families refused to join the government relocation programme. The World Bank notes that Compensation offered. . .was substantially less than the cost of replacing their lost assets, and most refused to accept it.10
In spite of local opposition, the dam’s reservoir was filled; villagers clung to the rooftops of their houses as the waters rose. In an internal memo on Kedung Ombo prepared for its 1990 Annual Meeting, the Bank noted that, Recent surveys of reservoir people show an average decline of 40 per cent in incomes since relocation, and 50 per cent of houseplots are smaller than before.11
Some of the evicted farmers took the Indonesian government to court over their poor compensation. Subsequently, the Supreme Court ruled that the government must pay Rp 50,000 for each square metre of land formerly owned by 34 farmers which was used for the Kedung-Ombo dam, plus Rp 2 billion for non-material losses incurred.12 This is a dramatic improvement on the Rp 500-800 per square metre offered under the original Bank-funded plan.

Ruzizi II Dam, Zaire

Officials predicted that the Ruzizi II hydroelectric dam, funded jointly by the World Bank and the European Development Fund, would affect just 200 people. In the event, over 60 times that number had to be resettled, nearly 13,000 people losing their homes and livelihoods.

Obligations central to the loan were not met and the massive claims for compensation were not met due to ill-preparedness and lack of funds. As Bruce Rich of the US Environmental Defense Fund comments:

It is stupefying that the Bank. . .managed to completely ignore 12,600 people.13

NUMBERS AFFECTED

The World Bank does not know how many people have been and are being evicted by the projects that it funds. Bank staff have consistently overlooked or drastically downplayed the number of people being displaced. In the case of the Kiambere dam on Kenya’s Tana River, the original project appraisal guessed a figure of 1,000 people on both sides of the riverbank, of which an unspecified number of people might have to be resettled.14 However, a 1987 survey showed that the real size of the affected population was 6,000 people. The result: the size and quality of landholdings available to those evicted were reduced, and family incomes fell by 82 percent.15 Similar cases abound:

The 1981 appraisal for the Guavio Hydroelectic project in Colombia claimed that 1,000 people would be displaced; the 1994 Rrevised estimateS is 5,500;
The 1986 appraisal for the Andhra Pradesh Irrigation II project in India claimed that 63,000 people would be uprooted; the 1994 Rrevised estimateS is 150,000.
The 1982 Staff Appraisal Report (SAR) for the Singrauli I & II power projects in India estimated that nobody would be displaced; the Bank’s new estimate is 49,000.16

Overall, according to the Review, the Bank had underestimated the numbers affected by its projects by 47 percent, or 625,000 people.17 The Review’s latest estimate is that current projects threaten two million people and that 500,000 people have already been evicted as a result of projects in the review period (1986-1993).18

Even these figures are highly speculative, however, since in many cases Bank staff could not supply the review team with any data on the numbers of people displaced by their projects. An unpublished regional review of projects involving resettlement in China, for example, records that, for 11 out of 36 World Bank projects causing evictions, project documents do not provide estimates of the numbers resettling.information on the area of land required, length of road constructed or similar information. . .in conjunction with population density, the review arrives at the spuriously precise figure of 473,000 people facing displacement by Bank projects in China.19

Other regional review working groups are more honest in their assessment. The Africa working group candidly admits:

Given the inadequacy of the baseline data and the uncertainty of the numbers, it would be meaningless to speculate as to the number of resettled people.20

Even where figures do exist for a region, they only take account of people directly displaced by projects. Excluded from the figures are those who lose their land or livelihoods as a result of subsidiary projects (such as compensatory afforestation schemes or irrigation canals associated with dams) or through secondary displacement (where displaced people themselves displace others). The 1985 appraisal for the Sardar Sarovar dam in India, for example, totally overlooked an estimated 140,000 farmers who will lose land to the project’s massive network of canals.21 Also overlooked were 140,000 tenant farmers who would be evicted from areas earmarked as resettlement zones in order to make land available for oustees from the reservoir area. In addition, people who live downstream of dams are often forced to abandon their homes because of the loss of fisheries, of irrigation provided by seasonal flooding, or of other benefits previously provided by the river. A study extending 200 kilometres downstream from the Kainji Dam in Nigeria found that fish catches and dry season harvests of yams and other crops declined by more than half after the closure of the dam.22

A RECORD OF FAILURE

Criticisms of the World Bank’s record on resettlement led to the Bank introducing a policy which stipulates that:

Where displacement is unavoidable, the objective of Bank policy is to assist displaced persons in their efforts to improve or at least restore, former living standards and earning capacity.23

Although mandatory for Bank staff, this policy has conspicuously failed to ensure the humane treatment of people evicted by Bank- funded projects. In 1983, and again in 1986, major shortcomings in policy implementation were revealed by review teams.24 Despite promises to improve, little has changed: the current review admits, for example, that long delays in paying compensation are common and that, in some cases, no payments are made at all.

At Ghana’s Kpong dam project, governmental shortfalls meant that compensation was never paid to the 7,000 affected people and their host communities. A case study in Nepal found an average delay of ten years between property expropriation and compensation payment.25

Regional resettlement working groups, which reported to the 1994 Review, revealed many instances of poor compensation and many instances where Bank staff failed to ensure even the most basic surveys on the incomes and conditions of evicted people. The groups reported as follows:

Latin America: few of the resettled people in the earlier period can be said to have im-proved their living standards and incomes as a result of the resettlement process. Baseline data . . . are often non-existent.26
Middle East and North Africa: The portfolio. . .failed, in all but one case, to systematically build into the design of the project the provisions needed to determine specific income levels of affected households following resettlement.26
East Asia and Pacific: The detailed information required to demonstrate that people in specific projects are able to improve or restore their standard of living are not available.26
South Asia: Bank procedures for processing and documenting resettlement issues at early stages of most [South Asia] projects have generally not been followed. . .Inadequate baseline information has made it difficult to determine how the projects have affected the standard of living of project-affected people.26

Other departments within the Bank confirm the regional working groups’ findings. For example, a 1993 study by the Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department (OED) on World Bank resettlement found that In India the overall record is poor to the extent of being unacceptable.27 The Bank estimates that 974,000 people are threatened with eviction by its projects in India.

The OED also reveals that a 1990 review of resettlement projects in the Latin American region was unable to find a single study of a Bank-financed project which quantitatively demonstrated that a resettlement population had been adequately rehabilitated in terms of income, health or other social welfare measures.28

The Resettlement and Development Review comes to the same conclusion as the OED study:

Although the data are weak, projects appear often not to have succeeded in reestablishing resettlers at a better or equal living standard and. . .unsatisfactory performance persists on a wide scale. Though fragmentary, the weight of available evidence points to unsatisfactory income restoration more frequently than to satisfactory outcomes.29

Indeed, 14 years after its resettlement policy was introduced, the Review can only claim one project, the Khao Laem Hydroelectric project, Thailand, where incomes for all households rose after resettlement.30 Yet, a study by another World Bank department reveals that even this project was unsuccessful. The Operations Evaluation Department study of resettlement at Khao Laem found that:

Resettlers remained greatly dissatisfied with compensation which continued to be the source of demonstrations and protests. About four-fifths of the households were similarly dissatisfied with the resettlement outcome; they considered themselves to be worse off than before resettlement.31

LACK OF APPRAISAL

Although the Bank’s 1980 resettlement policy stipulates that resettlement plans must be prepared before a project is approved, the Review reveals that, from 1986 to 1993, only an average of about 55 per cent of Bank-assisted projects could claim to have appraised full resettlement plans.32 Disturbingly, the Review also admits that less than 30 per cent of the resettlement plans have made income restoration a primary goal.33

Relocation plans are often prepared with minimal care: in the Bangladesh Urban Project, the proposed resettlement site was found to be under several feet of water and no technical analysis of its potential suitability for resettlement had been performed.34

Resettlement has been so badly planned in some cases that the Bank admits little can now be done for those being evicted:

Resettlement operations in several previously unsupervised projects, such as the Douala Infrastructure project in Cameroon, the Nigeria Multi-State Water Supply project, and the Regional Cities Urban Transport in Indonesia have already become problematic. In such cases, belated supervision is better than no supervision, but it is unrealistic to expect much to be accomplished so late into project implementation.35

DISMISSING LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

The Review also notes that, even where resettlement plans exist, affected and host communities are not adequately participating in the resettlement process. Local knowledge is rarely used in designing resettlement programmes or finding viable solutions.36

Many problems arise from this, such as in China’s Daguangba Multipurpose project, where failure to involve local people in selecting housing designs led to a near universal rejection of the contractor-built houses.37

In place of local knowledge and involvement, project proponents tend to rely on ,q>expert knowledge for project appraisal and oversight. The experts are normally Bank staff or consultants who focus mainly on projects’ economic and structural, rather than social, performance. The Review concedes that many engineering consulting firms, responsible for the technical design of major infrastructure projects worldwide, routinely display obliviousness to the adverse social implications of the designs they propose.38 It goes on:

Consulting firms often still fail to incorporate resettlement skills, especially local expertise, into their design teams, nor do they prepare resettlement components with the same rigour as the engineering components.39

With few important exceptions, most relocation timetables were driven by construction timetables and rather than resettlement needs. They did not link displacement to plans for preparing new resettlement sites.40

POOR RESETTLEMENT AFFECTS COSTS

The Review notes that many projects have been delayed by bad resettlement planning:

In a recent review of 123 projects in the Asian region, as many as 30 percent were delayed because of land acquisition and resettlement problems; the average delay was approximately two years. A draft review of more than 580 irrigation projects (OED, 1993) found that 22 percent of the projects reported delays from similar land acquisition and resettlement problems.41

Delays resulting from poor resettlement planning not only affect the incomes of displaced people, but also the economic viability of entire World Bank projects:

Incorrectly assessing the size of the population to be displaced by significant amounts usually leads to major problems during project execution: project delays, resource shortfalls, compensation disputes and an institutional inability to prepare adequate replacement resources for the resettlers.42

The Review notes:

Projects in Africa, such as the Cameroon Urban II, have been halted because counterpart compensation funds failed to materialize and local residents refused to be resettled. Such delays and cost overruns have contributed to driving down the economic rate of return of several projects to very low levels (India: Andhra Pradesh Irrigation; Mauritania: Gogol Irrigation; India; Subernarekha Irrigation). Colombia’s Guatape II Hydro Project offers an extreme example. . .[where] electricity losses [resulting from delays due to underestimating resettlement] amounted to $25.5 million of unsold energy, equivalent to 18 percent of the total project cost.43

Although a sample of 20 projects showed that resettlement costs averaged nine per cent and can be as much as 35 per cent of total project costs, only 50 per cent of the currently active projects displacing more than 200 people include a budget for resettlement.44 It goes on to warn:

In some cases failing to account adequately for resettlement can exaggerate a project’s attractiveness and, in extreme cases, can encourage economically marginal projects to proceed when alternative investments would have been superior.45

THE PRESSURE TO LEND

The continuing, systematic abuse of those evicted by World Bank projects reveals deep-seated structural faults within the Bank as an institution. As a 1992 report by the Bank’s Portfolio Management Task Force, led by Willi Wapenhans, makes clear, the Bank’s pervasive pre-occupation with new lending takes precedence over all other considerations.46 According to the Task Force, a number of current practices—with respect to career development, feedback to staff and signals from managers—militate against increased attention to project performance management.47 In the subculture which prevails at the Bank, staff appraisals of projects tend to be perceived as marketing devices for securing loan approval (and achieving personal recognition), with the result that little is done to ascertain the actual flow of benefits or to evaluate the sustainability of projects during their operational phase.48, 49

The Bank’s institutional priorities and management structure have thus encouraged staff to flout internal policy directives and borrower governments to ignore loan conditions. Unsurprisingly, the credibility [of loan agreements] as binding documents has suffered50 and evidence of gross non-compliance [with Bank legal covenants] is overwhelming.51 When borrowers disregard loan conditions, the typical response of Bank management is to look the other way or waive the relevant requirement. As Patrick Coady, the ex-Executive Director for the US, has remarked: No matter how egregious the situation, no matter how flawed the project, no matter how many policies have been violated, and no matter how clear the remedies prescribed, the Bank will go forward on its own terms.52

Although the Wapenhans Task Force recommended a number of wide ranging institutional reforms to overcome the pressure to lend within the Bank, they have not been implemented. No steps, for example, have been taken to introduce measures—including penalties and incentives that would affect career advancement—to hold the Bank’s task managers and their superiors responsible for complying with Bank guidelines. On the contrary, the Bank is currently proposing to reissue its Operational Directives—including OD 4.30 on Resettlement—in a simplified form, stripped of their mandatory procedures.

CAN THE BANK CHANGE?

Deep-seated institutional problems at the Bank will not be solved by reviews such as Resettlement and Development [see Appendix 1]. The Bank’s previous resettlement reviews created a brief focus on the issue which soon faded. The Review says that during 1993, resettlement planning and performance improved, but warns since considerable extra resources were needed and allocated to achieve these results it will be a challenge for all to maintain the recent level of effort.53

More than effort is required: the Bank is geared towards economic, not social priorities. The review admits the Bank continues to be underequipped in terms of staff for treating the broad social issues of its development activities, of which resettlement is only one aspect.54

Some Bank staff even maintain that there are advantages in displacing large numbers of people. The working group on involuntary resettlement in China states for example: The growth of the economy has been aided by the development of a relatively mobile, low cost source of labour—the so-called ‘floating population’. . .[which] is in the vanguard of labour market reform. Those individuals must find their own jobs and have no tenure beyond their contract period. All of China is moving toward this model to allow the flexibility and incentives needed to enhance labour’s contribution to continued development.55

THE BRITISH EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

It is not only the Bank which is at fault, however. As Oxfam points out, questions need to be answered as to why project failures have continued without an effective response from the Bank’s Executive Directors, who have systematically failed to bring them to the attention of national legislatures.56

Currently one tenth of Britain’s aid budget, #249.7 million, is channelled via the World Bank Group.57 Yet the UK Delegation at the World Bank and the Overseas Development Administration in London have failed to treat the Bank’s institutional and operational failures on resettlement and in general with the seriousness that they deserve. The UK Delegation at the Bank has never, to our knowledge (hampered by the secret voting record), opposed a project at the Bank’s board, suggesting that successive UK Delegates have taken a limited view of the duty of oversight invested in them.

The ODA and the UK Delegation make minimal effort to undertake independent evaluations of projects coming up before the World Bank board. The ODA excuses this on the grounds that it does not have sufficient staff to supervise all projects and thus only evaluates controversial projects and those involving British bilateral aid. The option of using British influence to insist that the Bank adapt its operations to enable adequate planning and oversight never seems to be considered.

Although the ODA has assured British NGOs that their concerns about projects will be investigated, such investigation rarely amounts to more than discussions with Bank staff. Almost invariably the Bank’s position is relayed to critics without any judgement as to its plausibility or any indication as to where the UK Delegation stands on the issue. The exchange of letters reproduced in Appendix 1 illustrates the problem.

Given that the impartiality of Bank staff is open to question, as indicated by the Narmada controversy [see Box, p. 6-7], the UK Delegation’s reliance on Bank advice reveals a disturbing lack of judgement. Indeed, there is clear evidence that Bank staff consistently play down problems—even to the point of outright deception—when advising Executive Directors.

Reflecting on his own experience as a senior manager within the Bank, Michael Irwin, ex-Director of the Bank’s Health Services Department, states, The Board was generally regarded contemptuously by its senior staff. In 1989, according to Irwin, managers were advised by a Bank vice-president that the best tactic for handling the Board was the mushroom approach: keep it in the dark and feed it garbage.58

SOME QUESTIONS

The catalogue of resettlement failures, both on the part of the Bank and on the part of UK officials, raises a number of important issues which warrant an urgent response from the ODA. Specifically, concerned individuals and groups may wish to ask their MPs to press ODA ministers on the following points:

What action is the ODA taking on World Bank projects where the Bank found substantial and insoluble resettlement problems? Examples cited by the Bank include: the Douala Infrastructure project, Cameroon; the Nigeria Multi-State Water Supply project; and the Regional Cities Urban Transport project in Indonesia.
Why has Britain not insisted on the introduction of penalties to deter Bank staff from breaking operational guidelines on resettlement and other matters? How will the ODA ensure that Bank staff responsible for the failure to count, let alone compensate, people being displaced by Bank projects are censured?
Why has Britain not insisted on its contributions to the Bank being tied to a bench-marked process of reform at the Bank, including the overhaul of institutional structures, operational priorities and operational performance?
How does the British government intend to ensure that World Bank lending accords with ODA objectives in future? What mechanisms—aside from discussions with Bank staff—are activated when these objectives are not achieved?
How does the ODA justify channelling over 10 percent of its budget into the World Bank when it is failing to fulfil the ODA’s stated objective of poverty alleviation?
Can the use of British taxpayers’ money for Bank projects that involve involuntary resettlement be justified in future given the Bank’s own admission that its projects regularly break its own social guidelines?

Given the failure of the UK Delegation’s attempts to improve projects before they come to the Bank’s Board, should legislation be introduced, similar to the Pelosi amendment in the US, to prohibit the UK Delegation from approving projects where baseline surveys, resettlement plans and environmental assessments are unavailable, and where demonstrable local consultation is lacking?

CONCLUSION

The World Bank’s Resettlement and Development Review documents in detail how Bank staff routinely ignore its resettlement policy in almost all respects; the numbers of people being displaced are not adequately assessed or minimised; only half of Bank projects that cause evictions have a resettlement plan, and the implementation of such plans is extremely lax.

Significant improvement in the Bank’s performance is impossible while the Bank’s present institutional structure remains intact. Neither the Bank nor the ODA will change, however, without significant and sustained pressure from the public, concerned groups, and parliamentarians. Without such pressure, aid money will continue to be spent on projects which displace poor people into even greater poverty, often for projects which are economic as well as social disasters.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. European Community Natural Resource Management Project Evicts Thousands of Ugandan Peasant Families, Problem Project Briefing, Oxfam, 1993. The Briefing quotes the EC’s Chief Technical Advisor saying in November 1992, For political reasons, dealing with the encroachment issue was not shown as an objective in the World Bank’s Staff Appraisal Report (1987) or in the ECs Financing Agreement, although it was obvious to those on the missions involved that nothing would be achieved without the eviction of squatters.

2. Resettlement and Development, The Bankwide Review of Projects Involving Involuntary Resettlement 1986-1993, The World Bank Environment Department, Washington DC, April 1994, pp.2/6, 2/7.

3. Ibid., p.5/1.

4. Ibid., p.xv.

5. Ibid., p.iii-iv.

6. Ibid., p.2/9.

7. Ibid., p.2/9.

8. Ibid., p.2/9. ,q>Often the displaced are rural and poor, because new projects are brought to the most under-developed, poorest areas, where infrastructure is largely lacking and where land and political costs are lowest. For example in Thailand’s Third Power project area, per capita incomes of the resettlers are less than one third the national average.

9. The Chandil Nightmare, Kavaljit Singh, October 1991 (unpublished manuscript available from Public Interest Research Group, New Delhi, India).

10. World Bank op. cit.2, p.6/6.

11. Kedung Ombo Multipurpose Dam and Irrigation Project (Loan 2543QIND), Briefing Paper on Lessons Learned From Resettlement (Annual Meeting 1990), World Bank, p.4.

12. Editorial, Jakarta Post, July 14, 1994.

13. Resettlement Policies Violated at Ruzizi II, World Rivers Review, Vol. 5, no. 2, March/April 1990, p.8.

14. Resettlement in the Kiambere Project, World Bank Office Memorandum, April 14, 1989.

15. A Resettlement Survey in the Kiambere Hydroelectric Power Project—Preliminary Report, Mburugu, Edward K., March 1988, quoted in World Bank op. cit.2, p. 4/9.

16. World Bank, op. cit.2, p. 5/3.

17. World Bank op. cit.2, p.2/2.

18. Ibid., p.2/2. According to the Review: About 2.5 million people have been scheduled to be moved from their homes, their lands, or both, under the 192 projects of the FY1986-93 review period: 543,000 people have already been relocated under the 46 projects that had closed by the end of FY93, and almost 2 million more are in various stages of resettlement under the current portfolio.

19. China Involuntary Resettlement, Report No. 11641-CHA, Office of the Director China and Mongolia Department East Asia and Pacific Regional Office, World Bank, June 8, 1993, p. 66, p. 70.

20. World Bank op. cit.2, p. 4/4.

21. Sardar Sarovar, Report of the Independent Review, B. Morse et al., Resource Futures International, Ottowa, Canada, 1992, p. 203.

22. ‘River Basin Projects in Africa’, Scudder, T. Environment, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1989, Scudder, T., Recent Experiences with River Basin Development in the Tropics and Subtropics, Natural Resources Forum, forthcoming.

23. World Bank op. cit.2, p.1/10. World Bank projects also contravene the policies of outside agencies such as the UN. For example, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights resolved in 1990 that: International agencies should scrupulously avoid involvement in projects which. . .involve large-scale evictions of persons without the provision of all appropriate compensation. For more on this, see Forced Evictions and Human Rights, A Manual For Action, COHRE, Utrecht, June 1993.

24. The 1983 and 1986 reviews both concurred with accusations from those on the ground that major resettlement abuses were endemic to Bank projects. The 1983 report, Compulsory Resettlement in World Bank-Financed Projects: A Review of the OMS 2.33, concluded: Only a few of the projects causing compulsory resettlement have met [Bank policy’s] call to ensure that resettlement plans provide the resources and facilities needed by dislocated people to reestablish themselves as economically viable producers. In a similar vein, the 1986 Involuntary Resettlement in Bank-Assisted Projects: A Review of the Application and Procedures in FY 79-85 projects noted both the frequently low quality of preparation of resettlement components by the borrower and also the insufficient emphasis given to economically viable options for restoring the productive capacity of displaced populations.

25. World Bank op. cit.2, p. 5/18.

26. Ibid., p.4/4.

27. Early Experience With Involuntary Resettlement: Overview, Operations Evaluation Department, World Bank, p.v.

28. Ibid., p.24.

29. World Bank op. cit.2, p. x.

30. Ibid., p.4/3.

31. Early Experience with Involuntary Resettlement: Impact Evaluation on Thailand Khao Laem Hydroelectric (Loan 1770-TH), Operations Evaluation Department, World Bank, 29 June 1993.

32. World Bank op. cit.2, p. xiii.

33. Ibid., p.xiv.

34. Ibid., p.6.12.

35. Ibid., p.6/5.

36. Ibid,. p.xii.

37. Ibid., p.6/11. Other failures due to lack of local participation are given on p.5/7, for example: The original plan developed for the Mexico Hydroelectric project. . .failed to evaluate the quality of the soil in the principal relocation area which was not suitable for agriculture. And also: Ethiopia’s Amibara Forestry Project similarly assumed that Afar tribespeople would willingly abandon herding to work on forest plantations, an assumption that proved to lack any foundation once the project started.

38. Ibid., p.3/9.

39. Ibid., p.5/7.

40. Ibid., p.5/10.

41. Ibid., p.5/21.

42. Ibid., p.5/3.

43. Ibid., p.5/21.

44. Ibid., p.5/16.

45. Ibid., p.5/20.

46. Effective Implementation: Key To Development Impact, Portfolio Management Task Force, World Bank, July 24, 1992, p. iii.

47. Ibid., p.15.

48. Ibid., p.iv.

49. Ibid., p.14. According to the Task Force; Only 17 percent of staff interviewed felt that analytical work done during project preparation was compatible with the achievement of project quality.

50. Ibid., P.ii.

51. Ibid., p.8.

52. Statement to World Bank Board meeting, October 23, 1992.

53. World Bank op. cit. 2, Ibid., p.xviii.

54. Ibid., p.7/7. The Review also notes (p. 7/6) that 92 Task Managers are responsible for the projects causing displacement. RBy professional skills, this group consists of 60 technical experts (civil engineers, etc.) and 32 economists (including financial analysts, operations officers etc.)S.

55. World Bank, op. cit.19, p.61.

56. Embracing the Future. . . Avoiding the Challenge of World Poverty, Oxfam’s Response to the World Bank’s Vision for the Bretton Woods System, Policy Department Oxfam (UK and Ireland), 18 July, Oxford, 1994.

57. British Overseas Aid Annual Review, ODA, London 1993.

58 Letter to Financial Times from Michael Irwin, 28 September 1994.