Cut-off dates and opportunistic in-migration: eligibility, disclosure and defensibility
Abstract
The cut-off date determines who is eligible for compensation and who is not, and it is consequently the single most contested fact in most resettlement programmes. This paper examines its dual function — administering eligibility and deterring opportunistic in-migration — and the tension between them. It argues that the date's defensibility rests almost entirely on the quality of its disclosure and of the enumeration record established at the time, and that projects lose disputes about cut-off dates not because the date was wrong but because they cannot evidence when it was set or who was informed.
1. Two functions in tension
The cut-off date does two jobs. It makes eligibility administrable: without a fixed point at which the affected population is defined, a compensation programme has no closed set of claimants and no basis for refusing any claim. And it deters opportunistic in-migration: the arrival of people who move into a project area, or plant crops and erect structures within it, in anticipation of compensation.
These functions pull in different directions on the question of timing. Administering eligibility argues for setting the date once the project footprint is known with confidence, since a date set against a footprint that later changes creates its own injustices. Deterring in-migration argues for setting it as early as possible, since the incentive to migrate exists from the moment the project becomes public knowledge.
2. The in-migration problem is real and overstated
Opportunistic in-migration occurs and can be substantial where projects are widely publicised and compensation is generous relative to local incomes. Treating it as the dominant risk, however, produces its own failures. A project primed to detect opportunism tends to treat late-identified claimants as presumptively fraudulent, and the people most likely to be identified late are precisely those hardest to enumerate — mobile populations, tenants, seasonal users, women whose interests were subsumed under a household head at first pass.
The distinction that matters is between people who arrived to claim compensation and people who were always there and were missed. Only an enumeration record of reasonable quality can separate them, which means the defence against in-migration and the protection of genuine claimants rest on the same instrument.
3. Disclosure is what makes the date binding
A cut-off date that was not disclosed to the affected population is not a legitimate basis for excluding anyone, because it operates as a rule people were given no opportunity to comply with. Standards are consistent on this: the date must be established and communicated, in a manner and language the affected population can actually receive.
This is where disputes are usually won or lost. The question at review is not whether a date was set — a date is always in the RAP — but when it was communicated, through which channels, in which language, and whether the record of that communication was made contemporaneously or reconstructed. A disclosure register assembled afterwards is visibly a reconstruction, and it undermines the exclusion decisions that rest on it.
4. What defensibility requires
Three records make a cut-off date defensible. The decision itself, dated and attributable. The disclosure record: meetings held, notices posted, languages used, attendance captured at the time. And the enumeration record, timestamped, showing who was recorded as present before the date, with sufficient identifying detail that a later claimant can be tested against it.
Where those exist, exclusion decisions can be explained to a complainant, defended to a regulator and evidenced to an auditor. Where they do not, the project's position reduces to an assertion that it enumerated properly, which is exactly the assertion in dispute.
References
- [1]Performance Standard 5: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement. International Finance Corporation, 2012.
- [2]Guidance Note 5: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement. International Finance Corporation, 2012.
- [3]Good Practice Handbook: Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement. International Finance Corporation, 2023.
- [4]Environmental and Social Standards (ESS). World Bank, 2018.