Rusizi hydropower: a shared river, different resettlement expectations

This is a public-record case study. It uses the project context named in the title to examine a RAP problem; it does not claim access to a project register, confidential settlement or unpublished audit. Project documents and current lender requirements should be checked before relying on it.

Thesis

Rusizi illustrates why a river-dependent livelihood can defeat a purely cadastral model of resettlement. A person may depend economically on a river, landing site, fishing ground, crossing, irrigation source or common resource without holding the same formal land interest as a residential or agricultural parcel. The river system can also cross national boundaries, making the institutional question more complex. IFC PS5 recognises economic displacement arising from loss of access to assets and specifically identifies restrictions on access to common property resources as a resettlement risk; Guidance Note 5 discusses fishing grounds and grazing land as examples of resources whose loss can be directly adverse. World Bank ESS5 adopts the same broad treatment of economic displacement. The implication is that the affected population must be identified through livelihood evidence, not merely title records. A defensible RAP should establish who uses the resource, for what purpose, at what times, under what customary or community rules, and what happens to that livelihood when access changes. Where the resource crosses an administrative boundary, the grievance mechanism must still provide a clear local route to remedy. The research literature on common-property resources and involuntary resettlement supports this approach because resource systems often have users and institutions that are invisible to cadastral datasets. The strongest legal proposition is therefore that the relevant interest in a resettlement assessment may be an access or livelihood interest rather than a registered parcel. Authorities: IFC PS5 paras. 1 and 7 and Guidance Note 5; World Bank ESS5; applicable Rwanda, Burundi and DRC land/resource laws as relevant to the project footprint; Cernea; research on common-property resources.

The legal issue in this case

Rusizi demonstrates why river-dependent impacts cannot be allocated solely by cadastral or national boundary. The applicable land and acquisition laws address particular interests, while safeguard analysis may need to address downstream resource users and cross-border effects.

The project question

The factual question is who uses the river, when, for what activity and through which institution. A person may have no parcel claim and still face a material livelihood impact. The grievance route must identify a project owner rather than send the person from one national office to another.

What the scholarship still needs to establish

The gap is empirical evidence on transboundary livelihood systems and remedy. Legal scholarship can identify jurisdiction; it cannot alone show whether resource users were identified, consulted and restored.

Evidence a lawyer would request

Combine hydrological and project-footprint information with seasonal livelihood mapping, user interviews, consultation records and grievance allocation. State clearly which downstream effects are documented, predicted or unresolved.

Legal frame: East African and cross-border context

A regional project does not create one supranational land-acquisition law. Each affected jurisdiction retains its own rules on land, notice, valuation, acquisition, remedy and public administration, while the financing agreement may impose a common safeguard floor. The legally sound method is a matrix showing which national rule applies to which event and which project commitment goes further.

A regional comparison cannot resolve a claimant’s entitlement without the country, tenure, instrument and project documents. Cross-border reporting should therefore preserve local legal advice, translated disclosure and country-level grievance responsibility rather than present a regional generalisation as a rule of law.

The authorities below are starting points for verification. They are not a substitute for checking the consolidated law, regulations, cases and project agreements applicable to the specific acquisition.

• Uganda Legal Information Institute ↗
• Kenya Law ↗
• Tanzania Legal Information Institute ↗
• Rwanda Legal Information Institute ↗

The setting

The Rusizi river system links Rwanda and Burundi and illustrates how a shared water resource can make impacts and responsibilities cross administrative boundaries. Downstream users may depend on the river without appearing in a land acquisition schedule.

The RAP problem

A parcel-centred assessment can miss fishing, farming, transport, water access and other resource uses. Cross-border governance also makes it easy for a grievance to be referred between institutions without a clear project owner.

What the record should preserve

The impact assessment should identify resource users, seasonal patterns, downstream effects and the institution responsible for each mitigation. A shared monitoring framework needs locally collected evidence and a clear escalation path.

Reading the case through the standards

The legal and safeguards question is not whether a project can produce a compensation schedule. It is whether the schedule can be connected to a lawful acquisition process, a fair valuation method, an eligibility decision and an outcome that the affected person can actually experience. In Uganda, Article 26 of the Constitution places prompt, fair and adequate compensation before compulsory taking; the Land Act adds the tenure and disturbance-allowance context. Across the lender standards, the inquiry is wider still: people without formal title, economic displacement, replacement cost, livelihood restoration, consultation and grievance access all need a place in the project record.

That does not mean that every project is governed by Ugandan law or that a lender standard replaces national procedure. It means the case has to be read at the intersection of the applicable regimes. A title search may be legally necessary and still be an incomplete census. A signed agreement may prove that a document was executed and still be weak evidence that the amount was understood or that a livelihood was restored. A grievance may be closed administratively and still reveal a repeated design failure. Credibility comes from showing which proposition each document proves and which proposition requires a different kind of evidence.

What a serious case analysis would test

The first test is the impact boundary. Compare the engineering footprint with the social footprint: parcels, structures, crops and trees, but also access, customers, employees, common resources, seasonal users and people who depend on an affected household. The second is the decision chain. For each person or asset, can a reviewer move from identification to measurement, valuation, entitlement, approval, payment and remedy without relying on an unexplained spreadsheet change? The third is time. Notice, payment, possession, relocation, reinstatement and livelihood recovery are different events, and a project that reports only the earliest completed event will overstate its performance.

The fourth test is distribution. Aggregate completion figures can hide delayed claimants, women whose interests were recorded under another household member, tenants without title, vulnerable people who could not use the complaint channel, or communities waiting for a shared commitment. A credible monitoring sample should therefore be designed to find the difficult cases, not only to confirm the median case. It should preserve the reason an exception was made, who approved it, what the affected person received and what evidence supports closure. This is also where corruption risk becomes an evidence question rather than a rhetorical accusation: unexplained overrides, duplicate claims, missing measurements, payment mismatches and suppressed complaints are control signals that require investigation, not automatic conclusions of misconduct.

Research gap and practical implication

Public project material usually tells us what an instrument promised and, sometimes, what was paid. It rarely follows the same household from the baseline through implementation and into a measured outcome. That is the significant research gap running through East African RAP practice. A stronger study would combine the public legal and project record with anonymised household interviews, geospatial change, grievance trends and livelihood indicators. It would distinguish documented fact, reported allegation, project assertion and independent finding. It would also state what cannot be known from the available record.

Sources and limits of the public record

The article’s cited materials establish the standards, legal context or public accountability framework; they do not necessarily establish every factual proposition about the named project. A scholar should separate a primary legal rule, a lender requirement, a project disclosure, a reported allegation and an independently verified finding. That separation is not pedantry: it is what prevents a case study from laundering an assertion into a fact. It also identifies the next research step, whether that is a court record, a disclosed RAP, a monitoring report, a household interview or a project response.

• Performance Standard 5: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement ↗ — International Finance Corporation, 2012.
• Guidance Note 5: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement ↗ — International Finance Corporation, 2012.
• Good Practice Handbook: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement ↗ — International Finance Corporation, 2023.
• Integrated Safeguards System: Policy Statement and Operational Safeguards ↗ — African Development Bank Group, 2023.

For practitioners, the implication is immediate: design the register as a chain of evidence before the first payment. Give every affected person and asset a stable identifier. Keep versions of the footprint and entitlement decision. Store the source of each rate and the reason for each exception. Record consultation in a way the affected person can use, protect sensitive grievances without making them invisible, and assign every livelihood or reinstatement commitment an owner, date, indicator and closure document. A case study is useful when it changes those controls, not when it merely provides a memorable project name.

Questions that test the thesis

• Which river-dependent users are absent from the parcel register?
• How are downstream and seasonal impacts identified?
• Who receives and resolves a grievance that crosses an administrative boundary?