What is livelihood restoration, and how is it different from compensation?

Compensation pays you for what you lost. Livelihood restoration is a separate obligation to get your income back to at least where it was before the project. One is a transaction that ends when the money arrives; the other is an outcome measured over years, and it is the part of a resettlement programme most often committed to and least often delivered.

Why the two are not the same

A household paid the full replacement value of two hectares has been made whole for an asset. Whether it is earning what it earned before depends on whether it could buy comparable land nearby, whether it can farm the new land as productively, and what happened to the money in the interim.[1]

The standards recognise that gap by setting the obligation at restoration — and in the more recent formulations, improvement — of livelihoods, not at payment of a fair price.[2]

Compensation can be evidenced by a receipt. Restoration cannot — it requires knowing what you earned before, and measuring what you earn now.

What it should involve

• A baseline — a record of your income and its sources before displacement, without which nothing afterwards can be assessed.
• Support matched to what you actually lost — replacement land or intensification for a farmer, premises and customers for a trader, access arrangements for a herder or a fisher.
• Working capital and transitional support, because the binding constraint on a displaced household is usually cash at the wrong moment rather than knowledge.
• Time. Programmes run for years past construction, and the obligation does not end when the works do.
• Measurement of income against the baseline, reported as recovery rather than as training sessions delivered.[3]

What it too often is instead

A three-month course in tailoring or welding, a kit at the end, and no measurement of whether anyone earns anything afterwards. Training is an input to a livelihood, not a livelihood, and forty people trained in one trade in one community can saturate the market the programme is meant to place them in.

If you are affected

Ask three questions, early: what was recorded about my income at the census; what specific support am I entitled to and for how long; and how will anyone know whether my income recovered.

If the answer to the first is nothing, that is worth raising immediately — a baseline cannot be created retrospectively, and without it the project has no way to demonstrate it met the obligation, which means in practice it will not.[4]