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Increasingly the environment, and climate risks in particular, are influencing migration and planned resettlement in Vietnam, raising the spectre of increased displacement in a country already confronting serious challenges around sustainable land and water use as well as urbanisation. Planned resettlement has emerged as part of a suite of measures being pursued as part of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation strategies. This paper provides an historical, political, legal and environmental overview of resettlement in Vietnam identifying key challenges for framing resettlement as climate change adaptation. The paper outlines the scale of past resettlement in Vietnam, identifying the drivers and implications for vulnerability. Detailed case studies of resettlement are reviewed. Through this review, the paper reflects on the growing threat of climate change and the likelihood of increased displacement associated with worsening climate risks to identify some critical considerations for planned resettlement in climate change adaptation planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper conceptualises the process of voluntary relocation undertaken by rural farmers to informal settlements in coastal cities. These are journeys that occur without formal institutional support, utilising migrants' own agency. Learning from these community‐driven relocations has merit in rethinking climate change adaptation at the regional level. In this paper we present stories of 17 families who have progressively relocated to the fringes of Khulna city in southwestern Bangladesh. We observe three key attributes: first, relocations are slow, neither singular nor immediately completed, but rather take months of careful back and forth journeys of family members between their places of origin and destination. Second, relocations rely on small networks of relatives and acquaintances at the destination. Third, relocations are built on shared responsibilities distributed among a range of actors in places of origin and destination. We conclude that these slow, small and shared relocations are likely to be realised as forms of ongoing adaptation by rural farmers if their aspirational mobilities, social relations and supports are maintained at a regional scale. This kind of migration as adaptation may bring about just outcomes for those displaced without necessarily promoting rigid planning interventions that tend to fix resettlement solutions in place and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many disaster settings, top‐down responses emphasise 'expert‐led' solutions that often involve relocating disaster‐affected communities. While the intention might be to move people from harm's way and facilitate recovery, failure to attend to local pre‐disaster circumstances as well as the interplay between power, resilience and vulnerability within and around affected communities often sees resettlement reconfigure as displacement or disconnection. This oversight may even usher in a new phase of dispossession and disadvantage for marginalised groups (particularly in colonial settings). This paper explores experiences in Australia, Japan and Taiwan to reflect on what issues of local sociality, local culture and local resilience need to be attended to in framing 'better' disaster responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planned resettlement is being widely considered as a response to the impacts of climate change. As many millions of people are expected to be displaced in the coming decades, scholars and policymakers are searching for precedence to inform their research and planning, particularly from experiences of Development‐Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DIDR). Nowhere in the world is DIDR and other closely related forms of planned resettlement more prevalent than in China: an estimated 78 million people have been displaced by development projects over the last six decades. While planned resettlement has consistently been shown to cause impoverishment, the Chinese state views it as the answer to a multitude of social ills including poverty, environmental damage, low levels of domestic consumption, and most recently, climate change, providing impetus to the normalisation of resettlement as adaptation. This paper examines the prospects for just outcomes in resettlement projects by examining distributive justice at multiple scales in existing resettlement practice in China. It finds that due to the interplay between resettlement and questions of procedural justice, prospects for just outcomes are quite limited, and that in order to achieve fair adaptation, alternatives to planned resettlement should be emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the uneven experiences of decollectivisation, using Thai Nguyen province as a setting for an exploration of divergent outcomes of, and local responses to, land allocation. Ethnicity, blood relations and settlement history are identified as emerging axes of differentiation in new patterns of vulnerability regarding access to land. This trend is evidenced by the phenomenon of farmers who migrated to the region during the collectivisation period and were subsequently left landless as longer term residents from other ethnic groups reclaimed their ancestral lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001, two indigenous Orang Asli communities living in Peninsula Malaysia were forced to leave their homelands to make way for the Sungai Selangor dam. The dam, built to resolve water shortages in Kuala Lumpur, came with a comprehensive compensation package designed to alleviate the hardships faced by the displaced communities. This paper explores the discursive and material impacts of these compensation packages. We argue that the emerging literature on compensation for displaced people values the same sorts of economic and social criteria as the Malaysian government does in its pursuit of modernising the Orang Asli. Their shared belief that effective compensation would improve the quality of life for affected communities above pre-displacement levels helped to publicly legitimise the dam-building project. Interviews with the displaced communities, however, found stark differences in community satisfaction which have more to do with losses of intrinsic place-based cultural and spiritual values, for which there may be no effective or adequate compensation, than social and economic criteria. We conclude that compensation programmes will always struggle to effectively cope with these less tangible place-based values and that open acknowledgement of this weakness is required if alternatives to displacement-inducing development projects are to be more readily considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an evaluation of current arrangements made for compensation and resettlement to farmers who will be displaced by the construction of the Three Gorges Project (TGP) on the Yangtze River. Kaixian County is used as a case study. Under present regulations the specific value of peri–urban land is underestimated, neither cash–in–hand arrangements nor land–for–land swaps are adequate. There are other problems. The availability of suitable land for resettlement is scarce and rarely of equivalent quality. The inflexibility of the ‘household responsibility system’ contributes to the problem. It is suggested that some of those facing displacement should be encouraged to accept resettlement in places at considerable distance from their current homes and that a more creative approach should be taken to the issue of compensation to enable people to develop their trade and business skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an improving regulatory framework and policies governing compensation and resettlement, the majority of the millions displaced worldwide each year by hydropower dam construction continue to experience marginalisation and impoverishment, suggesting that external financial support must be supplemented by strengthened community-based resilience. In order to understand more about the innate resources of displaced rural communities, we applied a community resilience approach to two resettled Co-tu ethnic minority villages in an upland area in central Vietnam to identify their community capitals and their application in improving livelihoods and living conditions. We found that weak human and financial capital constrained the ability of the resettled residents to adopt new livelihoods or migrate to seek employment. Reduced forest and river access also problematised responses to a lack of agricultural land. However, traditionally strong village affinity and social networks were retained. In addition, indigenous skills such as housing construction, honed by a highly mobile traditional lifestyle, allowed residents to construct culturally significant structures like community houses and modify or augment received housing stock. These elements of social and cultural capital eased the process of post-resettlement adaptation. We conclude that governments should reassess current resettlement policies that prioritise financial compensation and should incorporate awareness of the adaptive resilience and limitations fostered by indigenous knowledge and practices in resettlement action plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The realisation that climate change might necessitate resettlement of people displaced initially raised interest in the experience of development‐forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR). Looking back, in 1980 the first international policy on involuntary resettlement was approved to address perceived weaknesses in state property and expropriation law to safeguard people in the way of development projects. Since then international policy and praxis have brought global attention to developmentally displaced people but have not guaranteed them an effective safeguard. Recently, renewed attention has focussed on state legal and governance frameworks substantively and procedurally. Identifying four key policy objectives that resonate with climate change displacement I analyse their treatment in a data base of DFDR laws and regulations from 40 Asia Pacific states. This analysis finds overall little legal congruence. Innovative new formulations in some Asian state laws address recent public criticisms and research findings, but mostly are yet to demonstrate positive outcomes for displaced people. Pacific states increasingly abandon expropriation law to negotiate lease terms for public infrastructure projects with customary landowners that do not extinguish customary title. Any laws governing climate change relocations must protect rights, livelihoods, well‐being, inclusive decision‐making and community initiatives with procedures whilst not relinquishing climate‐change‐reducing action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most resettlement in the Pacific, whether for political, economic or environmental reasons, has been in some respects unsuccessful, often resulting in land disputes, social conflicts, marginalisation, impoverishment and return migration. Resettlement after volcanic eruption poses particular problems because of necessary immediacy, temporal uncertainty over the duration of the displacement and the wish of most of those displaced to return, when possible. The eruption of the Manam Island volcano in 2004-2005 displaced over 9000 people to the nearby mainland. Successful resettlement, one of the largest necessitated in the Pacific region, has proved difficult, resulting in land disputes, violence, disease and inertia, as a consequence of 10 years of government inability to achieve a permanent resettlement plan or enact a plan. Despite formal opposition, and intermittent volcanicity, many Manams have chosen to return to the island. The Manam Islanders' experience provides a warning about the complex challenges inherent in population resettlement in only subtly different cultural, geographical and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]