Displacement on linear infrastructure: why corridors are harder than sites
Abstract
Resettlement scholarship and guidance draw heavily on site-based projects — dams, mines, urban redevelopment — where a defined area is cleared and a concentrated population relocated. Linear infrastructure displaces differently: partial takings across long corridors, thousands of households each losing a fraction of their holding, spread across many administrative jurisdictions. This paper examines the consequences of corridor geometry for eligibility, valuation, engagement and monitoring, and argues that the dominant failure mode is not the severity of individual impacts but the administrative burden of managing many small ones consistently.
1. Partial taking as the normal case
A corridor project rarely takes a whole holding. It takes a strip: a right of way across a field, an easement under which cultivation may continue but building may not. The affected household usually remains in place. Physical displacement is the exception; economic displacement is the rule.
Partial taking raises a question that whole-site acquisition avoids: whether the residual holding remains viable. A farm bisected by a right of way may retain most of its area and lose most of its utility — access severed, irrigation interrupted, a plot too narrow to work with the equipment available. Compensation calculated on area taken systematically undercompensates in these cases, and the standards' concept of severance damage exists precisely to address it. It is frequently omitted.
2. Jurisdictional multiplicity
A corridor crosses many administrative units, and each may bring its own compensation rate schedule, its own land administration practice and its own local authorities to engage. This creates a consistency problem with no equivalent on a site project: identical losses on either side of a district boundary may attract materially different compensation.
Projects respond either by applying one schedule throughout, which conflicts with local rate-setting authority and with genuine local price variation, or by applying local schedules, which produces visible inequity along the corridor. Neither is fully satisfactory, and the choice should be made explicitly and disclosed rather than emerging by default from whichever valuer covered which section.
3. Scale without concentration
A corridor may affect a population comparable to a large dam, but distributed over hundreds of kilometres. Engagement that would be practical with a concentrated community becomes a logistical exercise: meetings in dozens of locations, disclosure in several languages, a grievance mechanism that must be reachable from anywhere along the alignment.
The same dispersion complicates monitoring. A sample adequate for a concentrated population may be unrepresentative along a corridor where conditions vary systematically with geography, and follow-up requires travel that erodes monitoring budgets quickly.
4. Alignment change as a live risk
Corridors move during design. A realignment that improves engineering outcomes can invalidate enumeration already completed, create newly affected households after a cut-off date has been set and disclosed, and release households previously enumerated and told they were affected.
Managing this requires that enumeration records be tied to geography rather than to a static list, so that the affected population can be recomputed when the alignment changes and the difference identified explicitly. Projects that maintain their register as a spreadsheet detached from the survey data typically cannot do this, and respond to realignment by re-enumerating — which is expensive, and which resets the credibility of the cut-off date.
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]Integrated Safeguards System: Policy Statement and Operational Safeguards. African Development Bank Group, 2023.