Displacements in the Asia Pacific region are escalating. The region has for decades experienced more than half of the world’s natural disasters and, in recent years, a disproportionately high share of extreme weather-related disasters, which displaced 19 million people in 2013 alone. This volume offers an innovative and thought-provoking Asia-Pacific perspective on an intensifying global problem: the forced displacement of people from their land, homes, and livelihoods due to development, disasters and environmental change.
This book draws together theoretical and multidisciplinary perspectives with diverse case studies from around the region – including China’s Three Gorges Reservoir, Japan’s Fukushima disaster, and the Pacific’s Banaba resettlement. Focusing on responses to displacement in the context of power asymmetries and questions of the public interest, the book highlights shared experiences of displacement, seeking new approaches and solutions that have potential global application. This book shows how displaced peoples respond to interlinked impacts that unravel their social fabric and productive bases, whether through sporadic protest, organised campaigns, empowered mobility or; even community-based negotiation of resettlement solutions. .
The volume will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in development studies, environmental and climate change studies, anthropology, sociology, human geography, international law and human rights.
Introduction Susanna Price Part I: Escalating displacements: convergences, rationales and the search for alternatives 1. How climate extremes are affecting the movement of populations in the Asia Pacific region François Gemenne, Julia Blocher, Florence de Longueville, Nathalie Perrin, Sara Vigil, Caroline Zickgraf and Pierre Ozer 2. Multiplying displacement impacts: development as usual in a changing global climate Kate Hoshour 3. Displacement and resettlement as a mode of capitalist transformation: evidence from China Brooke Wilmsen and Michael Webber 4. ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’: a critical evaluation of the newest Indian Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Act (2013) Chiara Mariotti Part II: Pressures on land: global issues, country strategies and local responses 5. From Banaba to Rabi: a Pacific model for resettlement? John Connell and Gil Marvel Tabucanon 6. India’s grassroots movements against investment-forced displacement Felix Padel 7. Local responses to land grabbing and displacement in rural Cambodia Andreas Neef and Siphat Touch 8. Resettlement and borderlands: adapting to planned population resettlement on the Cambodian-Thai border Jessie Connell 9. Community strategies for accountability in displacement: the experience of communities in Boeung Kak Lake, Cambodia Adam McBeth 10. Development-forced land grabs and resistance in reforming Myanmar: the Letpadaung Copper Mine Emel Zerrouk Part III: Environment, climate change and disasters 11. Disaster prevention resettlement programme in western China as an adaptation to climate change Yinru Lei, Max Finlayson, Rik Thwaites and Guoqing Shi 12. Conservation-led displacement, poverty and cultural survival: the experiences of the indigenous Rana Tharus community in far-western Nepal Lai Ming Lam 13. Pondering the right to return… and the right not to: Fukushima evacuees in limbo Jane Singer and Winifred Bird 14. Negotiating relocation in a weak state: land tenure and adaptation to sea-level rise in Solomon Islands Rebecca Monson and Daniel Fitzpatrick 15. Land for housing: international standards and resettlement in tsunami-affected Indonesia Daniel Fitzpatrick Conclusion Jane Singer and Susanna Price
Susanna Price is a Research Associate in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. Jane Singer is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University.
