Who prepares a Resettlement Action Plan?
A consultancy team writes it, the borrower owns it, the lender reviews it — and the people who implement it are usually none of the above.
A consultancy team writes it, the borrower or developer owns it, and a lender reviews it. The people who then implement it are usually none of those three — which is the structural reason so many adequate plans produce inadequate outcomes.
Who does what
- The consultancy team — a resettlement specialist, a registered valuer, a sociologist, enumerators and a GIS technician — conducts the census, values the assets, drafts the entitlement matrix and writes the plan. Then it demobilises.
- The borrower or project company owns the obligations. The plan is theirs, the commitments bind them, and the money is theirs.[1]
- The implementing unit inside the agency does the actual work: paying, relocating, handling grievances, running livelihood programmes and monitoring for years.
- The lender reviews and approves, then supervises against what was approved.[2]
The handover problem
The plan is written by people who do this repeatedly. It is implemented by a unit that may be doing it for the first time, with two or three staff, other responsibilities, and no authority over the land office, the valuation authority or the local government whose cooperation the schedule assumes.[3]
The most damaging version of this is records. Where the register, the valuation files and the payment reconciliation live in the consultant's systems and arrive as a final deliverable, the agency inherits a dataset it did not build and cannot query, without the people who know its exceptions — and completion audit then tests a record nobody in the room maintained.
What to fix at procurement
- Specify the data system as something the agency holds, with the consultant working inside it — not as a deliverable handed over at the end.
- Require a defined handover period with overlap, or extend the same team into implementation support.
- Name the implementing unit, its staffing and its budget in the plan itself, rather than describing institutional arrangements in the abstract.[4]
If you are an affected person
The people you meet in the field — enumerators, valuers, community liaison officers — are usually consultants, and they will leave. The obligations stay with the agency or company.
So it is worth knowing which body owns the commitments, and getting the name and contact of the implementing unit rather than only the survey team. Grievances raised after demobilisation go to the owner, and a project that cannot tell you who that is has a problem you should record.
Sources
- [1]Performance Standard 5: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement — International Finance Corporation, 2012.
- [2]ESF Guidance Note 5: Land Acquisition, Restrictions on Land Use and Involuntary Resettlement — World Bank, 2018.
- [3]Good Practice Handbook: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement — International Finance Corporation, 2023.
- [4]Guidance Note 5: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement — International Finance Corporation, 2012.
Olule Solomon
Lead Consultant, ValueSpace
Olule Solomon is Lead Consultant at ValueSpace, where he works on land acquisition and resettlement systems for donor-financed infrastructure in East Africa. He writes about the practical gap between what the safeguard standards require and what a project can actually evidence at completion audit.
Related reading
- Writing terms of reference for a RAP consultancyMost weaknesses in a RAP were procured, not drafted. The clauses that decide whether the plan you receive is implementable.
- Who approves a RAP, and what are they checking?Usually a national authority and a lender, in that order, against different criteria. What each one is actually looking for.
- What happens after a RAP is approved?Approval is the halfway point, not the end. The order of what follows decides whether the plan survives contact with the site.
- Who pays for resettlement compensation?The project pays, through the borrower or the developer. Why the source of funds matters to how quickly you are paid.
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PAP register, replacement-cost valuations, entitlements, recorded payments reconciled against disbursement files, and grievances — every change attributed and time-stamped, so a completion audit is evidenced rather than reconstructed. Offline-first in the field.