Graves, shrines and chance finds: cultural heritage in a resettlement

Every other entitlement in a resettlement can be valued, scheduled and delivered on the project's timetable. Graves cannot. Relocating a burial site runs on the requirements of the families and custodians concerned, and a project that tries to compress it into the works programme will either cause lasting harm or be stopped by the community — often both.

This is also the part of a RAP where two standards apply at once: PS-5 for the displacement, and PS-8 for the cultural heritage.[1]

What PS-8 adds

PS-8 covers tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and its logic mirrors PS-5's: avoid first, mitigate only where avoidance is not feasible. For a burial ground or an active shrine, avoidance means a design change — moving a tower, shifting an alignment — and that option only exists if the heritage was identified before the design was fixed.

Identification is therefore the critical step, and it is difficult. Burial sites are frequently unmarked, known only to the families concerned, and not volunteered to strangers. Sacred groves look like woodland. Shrines look like nothing at all from a survey vehicle.

Cultural heritage that a project fails to identify does not become less significant. It becomes something the project discovers with a bulldozer.

Chance find procedures

Because identification is never complete, PS-8 requires a chance find procedure: a project-specific protocol setting out what happens when previously undocumented cultural heritage is encountered during works.[2] The client must not disturb the find further until a competent specialist has assessed it and actions consistent with the standard have been identified.

A chance find procedure only works if it is operational at the level of the person holding the shovel. That means:

• every crew knows what to do, in their working language, before works start;
• the authority to stop work sits with someone present on site, not with a head office;
• a named specialist can be reached and mobilised within a defined period;
• the custodian community is notified as a first step, not after the assessment;
• every invocation is logged, with what was found and what was decided.

A procedure that exists in the ESMP and has never been briefed to a contractor is not a procedure. It is a document about one.

Relocating graves

Where avoidance genuinely is not feasible, grave relocation becomes an entitlement in the matrix — and one that cannot be costed by formula. The entitlement is the full cost of exhumation and reinterment at a site the custodians accept, including the ceremonies they specify, performed by whom they specify, at a time they consider appropriate.

Several practical points recur:

• Consent belongs to the family, not the landholder. The person who owns the land a grave sits on is frequently not the person with authority over the grave.
• Timing may be seasonal or ritual. Some traditions restrict when exhumation may occur. That constraint is not negotiable against a construction schedule.
• The destination site needs its own security of tenure. Relocating graves to land the family does not control creates a future displacement.
• Costs are borne by the project. Requiring families to fund ceremonies for a relocation they did not choose is not compensation.

Intangible heritage

PS-8 also reaches practices, knowledge and uses attached to place — routes walked for a purpose, sites used for initiation or seasonal ritual, resources gathered for customary use. These leave no physical trace and no title record, and they are routinely absent from RAPs for that reason.

Identifying them requires consultation designed to surface them: asking about use and meaning rather than about ownership, with people who hold that knowledge, in settings where they will say so. That is a different exercise from an asset inventory and needs to be scoped as one.

Grievances here escalate differently

Cultural heritage grievances do not behave like compensation grievances. They are frequently collective rather than individual, they are not resolvable by payment, and they carry a moral weight that makes them highly visible to lenders and media alike.[4]

A grievance mechanism that handles them as ordinary valuation disputes — offering a sum and closing the case — reliably escalates them. The workable response is to route them to a distinct pathway involving the custodians themselves, with authority to reopen the underlying decision rather than only to adjust an amount.

What the record has to show

For each affected site: how it was identified, who the custodians are, what alternatives to disturbance were considered and why they were rejected, what was agreed with the custodians, when the relocation occurred, and confirmation from the custodians that it was carried out as agreed.

That last item is the one to insist on. A relocation the project considers complete and the community does not is a grievance waiting for the completion audit to find it.