The disclosure register: proving that a person was told before the decision was taken

1. Publication is not notice

Disclosure requirements are commonly discharged by making a document available: a copy at a district office, a file on a project website, a summary read at a public meeting. Each is a publication act, and publication is a necessary condition of notice without being sufficient for it. The compliance question that arises later is not whether a document was published but whether an identified person had access to the information relevant to them before a decision was taken that affected their interests. [1]

The difference becomes concrete in the situations that generate complaints. A household asserts it did not know that a rate had been revised, that a cut-off date had passed, or that an entitlement it expected had been altered. The project responds that the information was disclosed. Both statements can be true simultaneously, and the resolution turns on whether the project can show a path by which that household could reasonably have received the information.

A register exists to make that path traceable. Where a publication record answers 'what did we publish', a disclosure register answers 'what information, in what version and language, was made available to which audience, by what means, on what date, with what evidence' — which is the form the question is actually asked in.

2. What has to be disclosed, and when

The recurring disclosable items on a land acquisition project are the assessment documents, the resettlement instrument itself, the entitlement framework and rates, the cut-off date and its consequences, the grievance mechanism and how to use it, and the outcomes of monitoring. [2][3] Their timing obligations differ in a way that is easy to miss: some must be disclosed before a decision is finalised so that comment can influence it, while others must be disclosed once settled so that people can act on them.

The pre-decision category is the more demanding and the more frequently compressed. Disclosure intended to allow comment requires a period long enough for people to obtain the document, understand it, take advice and respond — and project schedules routinely allocate a period calibrated to the minimum stated in a policy rather than to what the affected population would need.

Cut-off dates deserve separate treatment because the consequence of failed notice is severe and irreversible. A cut-off establishes that assets created afterwards are not compensable, which means a household that did not receive notice may make an investment it will never recover. Where a project cannot evidence that notice reached a household, its position in refusing a subsequent claim is weak, and the equitable answer is usually to compensate [4] — a position the World Bank's guidance on the equivalent standard takes as well. [5] — which is why notice records for cut-off dates repay unusual care.

3. Re-disclosure after material change

The most commonly missed obligation in this area is not initial disclosure but re-disclosure. A resettlement plan is disclosed and approved. Rates are subsequently revised, an alignment shifts, an entitlement is redefined, or a delivery mechanism changes. The project implements the revised position and does not repeat the disclosure step, because the plan was already disclosed.

This produces a population operating on superseded information, often including the information on the basis of which they made decisions or signed agreements. Where the change is adverse, the resulting grievances are difficult to resolve because the household's expectation was formed by the project's own earlier disclosure.

A register makes this visible by recording version alongside content. Where each disclosure is tied to a document version, a change of version raises an obvious question about whether the new version has been disclosed to everyone the old one reached. Without versioning, the question does not present itself, and the omission is discovered only when someone complains.

4. Evidence that survives

Disclosure evidence decays faster than most safeguard evidence because much of it is inherently ephemeral: a notice posted on a board, an announcement made at a market, a radio broadcast. Each may be an entirely appropriate channel for the audience and none leaves a durable artefact unless one is deliberately created.

Practices that create durability are modest: photographing a posted notice in situ with a visible date and location; retaining the broadcast script together with the station's log; recording the specific meeting at which an item was announced with the item identified rather than subsumed into 'project update'; and obtaining acknowledgement for individually served notices where the consequence is significant.

Individual acknowledgement should be reserved for the decisions that warrant it — cut-off notice, entitlement determination, payment terms — rather than applied indiscriminately, since a project that seeks a signature for every communication will obtain signatures that mean nothing. The purpose is a record capable of supporting a contested assertion later, and that purpose only arises where something contestable is being communicated.

5. Conclusion

Disclosure is the safeguard obligation whose failure is most often discovered by an accountability mechanism rather than by the project — a pattern borne out in the volume of complaints accountability mechanisms record on exactly this ground. [7] Projects citing every applicable disclosure standard in their documentation are not thereby protected against it. [6] The pattern is consistent: the project believes it disclosed, the affected people say they did not know, and the absence of a register means the dispute cannot be resolved on the record and is resolved instead on impression.

The instrument that prevents this is unglamorous and cheap. A register that records what was disclosed, in which version and language, to whom, by what channel and on what date converts an argument about recollection into a question of fact — which is the condition under which a project that behaved properly can actually demonstrate it.