RPF or RAP? Choosing the right resettlement instrument

A resettlement policy framework and a resettlement action plan answer different questions. The RPF answers what rules will apply when we find out who is affected. The RAP answers who is affected and what each of them gets. The choice between them is determined by one fact: whether the footprint is known well enough to enumerate against.

Projects get this wrong in both directions, and both are expensive. An RPF prepared where a RAP was needed delays the census by a full appraisal cycle. A RAP attempted on an unfixed footprint produces enumeration that has to be redone.

When a framework is the correct instrument

A framework is appropriate where displacement is likely but not yet locatable. The characteristic cases are programmatic lending, where subprojects will be identified during implementation; multi-site programmes where sites are chosen later against criteria; and projects whose design will not be fixed until detailed engineering, which frequently follows financial close.[1]

In each case the honest position is that a plan cannot be written yet, and writing one anyway produces a document full of assumptions that will be contradicted. The framework instead fixes the rules in advance: eligibility categories, the valuation basis, the entitlement structure, the grievance procedure, consultation requirements, the institutional arrangements and the screening process by which each subproject will be assessed.

What a framework has to contain to be usable

Frameworks fail when they restate the standard rather than commit to anything.[3] A framework that says compensation will be at full replacement cost in accordance with applicable requirements has told an implementing agency nothing it can act on two years later, when the drafting team is gone.

A usable framework fixes, at minimum:

• The screening test that determines whether a subproject needs a full plan, an abbreviated plan, or none — with thresholds, not adjectives.
• The entitlement matrix in template form, with categories and bases defined and only the rates left to be established locally.
• The method for setting rates, including what happens where a statutory schedule falls below replacement cost.
• The cut-off date rule: who declares it, how it is disclosed, and what evidence of disclosure is retained.
• Who does what, with the budget line that funds it.

A framework is a set of commitments made before anyone knows who they will bind. That is exactly why it has to be specific — the people it protects have no say in it, because they have not been identified yet.

The transition that gets skipped

The point of failure in framework-based programmes is the transition from framework to plan. The framework is approved and disclosed at appraisal. Two years later a subproject is designed, and the team designing it is not the team that wrote the framework and often does not know it exists.

The result is a subproject that proceeds with land acquisition under national procedure alone, satisfying domestic law and none of the commitments in the framework — no census against the agreed instrument, no cut-off disclosure, no grievance mechanism, and compensation at statutory rates that were never benchmarked.[2]

The mitigation is procedural and cheap: the screening step is made a condition of subproject approval, with a named signatory, and the framework's requirements are carried into subproject contracts rather than living in a safeguards annex.

Where both are needed

Large projects frequently need both. The main works have a fixed footprint and get a RAP; the associated facilities — access roads, a substation whose site is still under negotiation, transmission spurs, contractor camps — are not yet located and are governed by a framework until they are.

This is the arrangement most likely to lose people. A household displaced by an access road is displaced by the project, and if the road is treated as a contractor's own arrangement it will be dealt with by informal payment with no record, no eligibility determination and no grievance route. Where a framework covers associated facilities, the contract that procures those facilities has to carry the obligation, or nothing does.[4]

The practical test

Ask whether an enumerator could walk the footprint tomorrow and know, for each parcel, whether it is inside or outside. If yes, a plan is required and a framework is a way of deferring work that should be done now. If no, a plan written today will be re-done, and the useful work is to make the framework specific enough that whoever picks it up in two years can execute it without asking anyone what was meant.