ABSTRACT
This volume’s introductory chapter begins with an overview on how the world’s first ever policy on development-caused forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR), adopted in February 1980 by the World Bank, has been gradually embraced on a worldwide scale. The progress of the policy took place along two simultaneous “itineraries”: depth (of content) and breadth (of geographic coverage).
The first itinerary was the (still insufficiently known) step-wise twenty-year advance in strengthening and enriching this pioneering policy with new knowledge, distilled from both scholarly research and on-the ground practice (successes and failures) in Bank-financed projects. The second itinerary is the DFDR policy’s geographic propagation outside the World Bank along six international “tracks” through the policy’s adoption by numerous other aid agencies, 80 large private sector commercial banks, and by some developing countries’ governments, up to the recent World Bank replacement of the Safeguard Policies with standards proposed to the borrowing countries, a change that is analyzed critically in this volume. The analysis is supported by a review of quantified data about the magnitude and accelerating displacement trends in the portfolio of World Bank projects that include DFDR processes, and about major failures in reconstructing livelihoods. The last part of the introductory chapter offers a synopsis of this book’s 13 chapters by researchers from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Australia, Europe, and North America.
