Can you choose where you are resettled?

You get a say, and rarely a veto. Most projects offer a choice between cash compensation and a place on a resettlement site — and the site has usually been selected before anyone is asked. Where the standards give you real leverage is in the consultation that is supposed to inform that selection, and in the requirement that the site actually work for your livelihood.

What the standards require

Affected communities must be consulted on resettlement options, and where livelihoods are land-based there is a stated preference for replacement land over cash.[1] Site selection is supposed to take account of access to livelihoods, services and markets — not simply of where land was available and cheap.

What is not guaranteed is that you choose the location. Sites are chosen for a group, and a project cannot generally provide a different site per household.

The choice you are usually offered

Cash or a serviced plot on a designated site. These are rarely comparable at the moment you are asked to decide: the cash is specific, and the site is a commitment to deliver something at a location and time that may not yet be fixed.[2]

That is why most people take the cash, and it says less about preference than it appears to. Before deciding, ask for both in the same terms: where exactly, what size, what services, by when, and what happens if that date slips.

The question that matters most about a site

Not the house. The distance and cost of getting to whatever earns you money.

Sites that fail do so overwhelmingly on access: the housing is adequate, the site is twelve kilometres from the market, the customers do not follow, and within two or three years households have sold or let the new house and moved back nearer to work.[3] When you are shown a proposed site, price the journey to your work, your market, your clinic and your children's school — and raise it formally if the answer does not work.

What to press for during consultation

• To see the site before deciding, not a description of it.
• Travel time and cost to the places you currently use.
• What services will exist there on the day you arrive, in writing.
• Plot size, and how it was matched to household size.
• Whose name the title will be in — and whether joint titling is available.
• What happens if the site is not ready when you have to leave: transitional accommodation and support, or a deferred possession date.[4]

Host communities

Wherever a site is placed, someone already lives nearby, and arriving into a community that was not consulted is a difficult start. If you are being moved, it is fair to ask what agreement exists with the host community and what has been done about pressure on their water, grazing, schools and clinic.