• Project induced displacement

Project induced displacement

This paper discusses how development induced displacement can impact human security – specifically in relation to the building of dams. It analyses current efforts being made by financial institutions to put in place appropriate mitigation and monitoring mechanisms to counter the negative impacts on human security.

The core assertion of this paper is that dam construction can severely impact human security by inducing forced displacement. It is argued that development induced displacement brought about by dams affects human security via a number of indirect factors – communities losing access to safe drinking water; higher incidences of disease; potential disasters – for example, dams breaking –and environmental degradation.

Financial institutions therefore need to integrate individual security considerations into their decision-making process. Doing so requires action at various stages of the project cycle, including the preparatory phase, the building and operation of the project, and ex-post (through evaluation of the longer-term human security and the effectiveness of the mitigation measures).

Key concluding points include:

• multilateral Public Financial Institutions (PFI’s) have made the greatest progress to date in mitigating and monitoring development induced development in large dam projects
  
• bilateral PFI’s have made less progress on both the mitigation and monitoring front; this is more pronounced at the project level than the institutional
  
• PFI’s weigh human security impacts and mitigation, and monitoring measures in the light of the risk of damaging their reputation
  
• improvements are still needed include bringing social considerations into a decision-making process still dominated by economic and financial considerations.
  

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