Relocation and Resettlement in Ceará - Houston Advanced ...

Recommendation: Consult with PAPs to make improvements in the food baskets.
Loss of Access to Common Property:
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FRC, PAGE 13
Community spaces and common property is being satisfactorily replaced in the resettlement sites
in Ceará. Generally, the quality of public infrastructure and spaces is better in the postresettlement
areas.
Recommendation: Continue successful community planning efforts.
Social Disarticulation:
Social support networks play a critical role in providing essential services such as childcare and
short-term credit in economically challenged areas. Displacement often results in the dismantling
of these networks and a consequent loss of social capital. Once dismantled, these networks are
hard to rebuild. Social capital loss is therefore higher in projects that disperse communities rather
than resettling them within pre-existing groups and social units. In Ceará, resettlement has, in
most cases, preserved family and social units as the entire communities have been moved
together. Very few PAPs refused resettlement and this further maintained the integrity of the
community and preserved local social capital. Indeed, in the few cases where such good planning
was not followed—that is, in the case where PAPs were hurriedly relocated from the actual
construction site of the Castanhão Dam and family and social units were disrupted—resettlement
has been unsatisfactory (See First Interim Report for details).
Recommendation: Continue practise of preserving community structures and cohesiveness.
II. Policy Recommendations
Resettlement Agencies should develop comprehensive income restoration programmes
that are based upon increasing the capacity and capabilities of project-affected
persons.
Income restoration is the most important metric by which resettlement programmes are measured.
Project-affected populations must at least regain their pre-displacement levels of income for the
resettlement to be considered satisfactory. Income restoration plans must therefore be prepared
and refined even before the populations are relocated. Attempts to restore incomes through
government grants and make-work programmes should be strictly avoided because these tend to
perpetuate themselves and create dependency amongst the PAPs.
Income restoration is one of the weaker links in the Ceará resettlement programmes, because
comparatively greater attention is paid to the planning and construction of the physical
infrastructure of the resettlement areas rather than on the replacement of income-generating
assets, which are critical for restoring incomes. Greater attention should be paid to replacement
agricultural land for farmers and ranchers than their living accommodations and residential
arrangements. In the case of tenant farmers, land provided must be an adequate replacement for
the lands upon which they were working for their patrons.
According to many studies and evaluations performed by the World Bank, income restoration
efforts have been most successful when PAPs have been able to share in the immediate benefits