When does a project need a standalone Livelihood Restoration Plan rather than a full RAP?

Where displacement is economic only — a transmission line taking a strip across farmland, a wayleave restricting cultivation — without anyone physically relocating. A resettlement plan is organised around relocation: site selection, housing, moving logistics. Where nobody moves, most of that structure is inapplicable, and the standalone LRP replaces it with a document focused on the productive system that was damaged.

Is livelihood restoration different from compensation?

Yes, and conflating the two is the most common failure in this area. Compensation is a payment for an asset's value. Restoration is an outcome — that the household's capacity to earn a living is at least what it was. A household paid full replacement value for land it cannot replace, because none is available to buy, has been compensated and not restored.

How do you measure whether a livelihood was restored?

Against a baseline of income and its sources, recorded before displacement or restriction, using an instrument capable of being repeated later. Participation counts — training sessions delivered, inputs distributed — are evidence of activity, not evidence of restoration. Only a second measurement using the same instrument, compared against the baseline, can show whether income recovered.

Why does partial land taking need special treatment?

Because the loss of function can exceed the loss of area. A strip taken from a farm can remove the only water access, the flat portion that was cultivable, or the frontage that made a roadside business viable — leaving a residual holding that is not economically viable at all, even though most of the parcel remains. A uniform area-based threshold misclassifies exactly these cases.

What is the most commonly excluded population from an LRP?

People whose income depended on the affected land but who are not the person who signs the compensation agreement — a spouse cultivating a separate plot within the household holding, adult children farming a portion independently, tenants and labourers who have no title at all. Standard eligibility under PS-5 does not depend on title; it depends on loss of income source.

CSVFree · no registration

Livelihood Restoration Plan (LRP) Template — IFC PS-5

A free standalone Livelihood Restoration Plan template for economic-only displacement — 11 sections from baseline to closure criteria, built against IFC PS-5 and the LRP module of the IFC Handbook.

11 sections · what each must establish · common failure · standard reference

The instrument most projects don't know they need

The word resettlement invites an assumption the standards do not share: that the obligation is triggered by people moving house. PS-5 attaches to loss of assets or of access to assets that leads to loss of income or livelihood, whether or not anyone relocates. A transmission line that moves nobody and reduces the productive base of two hundred households along its corridor has triggered exactly the same restoration obligation as a project that resettles a village.

Because nobody moves, these projects routinely present as low-impact and are resourced accordingly. Compensation is paid for the land taken and the project treats the matter as closed. The restoration obligation — separate from and additional to that payment — is frequently not recognised as having been triggered at all. This template exists for the moment someone on the project realises it was.

Why a resettlement template doesn't fit

Adapting a full RAP template for economic-only displacement produces a document with many empty sections — site selection, housing design, moving logistics — and one badly under-specified section carrying the entire weight of the obligation. The eleven sections here are built the other way round: around the productive system that was damaged, what will restore it, and how restoration will be measured against a baseline, with nothing borrowed from the relocation-specific parts of a RAP that do not apply here.

The severity question a percentage cannot answer

Partial taking generates an assessment problem with no clean shortcut. A project takes fifteen per cent of a holding; whether the household's livelihood has been reduced by fifteen per cent depends on which fifteen per cent was taken. The strip may contain the only water access, the boundary that kept livestock out, or the frontage that made a roadside enterprise viable — cases where the loss of function far exceeds the loss of area, sometimes to the point that the residual holding is not viable at all. Section 3 of the template exists because a uniform threshold cannot see this; it has to be assessed per household.

Questions

When does a project need a standalone Livelihood Restoration Plan rather than a full RAP?: Where displacement is economic only — a transmission line taking a strip across farmland, a wayleave restricting cultivation — without anyone physically relocating. A resettlement plan is organised around relocation: site selection, housing, moving logistics. Where nobody moves, most of that structure is inapplicable, and the standalone LRP replaces it with a document focused on the productive system that was damaged.
Is livelihood restoration different from compensation?: Yes, and conflating the two is the most common failure in this area. Compensation is a payment for an asset's value. Restoration is an outcome — that the household's capacity to earn a living is at least what it was. A household paid full replacement value for land it cannot replace, because none is available to buy, has been compensated and not restored.
How do you measure whether a livelihood was restored?: Against a baseline of income and its sources, recorded before displacement or restriction, using an instrument capable of being repeated later. Participation counts — training sessions delivered, inputs distributed — are evidence of activity, not evidence of restoration. Only a second measurement using the same instrument, compared against the baseline, can show whether income recovered.
Why does partial land taking need special treatment?: Because the loss of function can exceed the loss of area. A strip taken from a farm can remove the only water access, the flat portion that was cultivable, or the frontage that made a roadside business viable — leaving a residual holding that is not economically viable at all, even though most of the parcel remains. A uniform area-based threshold misclassifies exactly these cases.
What is the most commonly excluded population from an LRP?: People whose income depended on the affected land but who are not the person who signs the compensation agreement — a spouse cultivating a separate plot within the household holding, adult children farming a portion independently, tenants and labourers who have no title at all. Standard eligibility under PS-5 does not depend on title; it depends on loss of income source.

Read before you use it

Practical guides

Technical research

All RAP templates →

The software behind this

SmartLARMS keeps this as a live record, not a spreadsheet

A template is a starting point. The version that survives a completion audit is one where every change is attributed to a person and a date, and where the numbers reconcile to what was actually paid.

Talk to us → olules@smartlarms.com