Christopher McDowell

‘Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation: Implications for land acquisition and population relocation’

In response to the challenge of climate change developing‐country governments are evolving adaptation and mitigation programmes for which they are seeking international financing. This article presents the findings of a review of national action programmes and other interventions to assess their likely societal impacts with an emphasis on land‐use change, future land acquisitions, population displacement and resettlement. It considers the policy and development challenges involuntary resettlement in particular will pose, and assesses the robustness of current governance arrangements to manage them and cautions that at present the financing arrangements do not prioritise the legal protection of affected populations.

The Individual Voice

The people whose experiences inform this book spoke out because they wished to tell the wider world what resettlement had meant to them, to their families, and to their communities. They were not the subjects of a conventional research assignment, but rather participants in a communication project that aimed to give voice to people who had found themselves unwilling experts in the complex effects of displacement.

Rethinking displacement: Asia Pacific perspectives, edited by Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Kuntala Lahiri Dutt

that encompasses various mediums (sic) and platforms’ (14). This is weighty material, but Furuhata deftly guides us through the discussion by referring to specific films and then closely examining them. This tack of looking at a few well-selected examples and dissecting them, serves Furuhata well in the rest of the book. Through a detailed analysis of how her selected filmmakers mined television, documentary film, manga, newspapers, and traditional art forms in order to make their films, Furuhata is able to explore what a cinema of actuality actually consisted of. She argues early on that these filmmakers had a polysemic understanding of the term in which unscripted actions and events, documentary practice, journalistic topicality, and critical relevance in relation to contemporary social and political situations all came to form the definition of what this cinema might be, but such a point would be meaningless without her illuminating discussions of many of the films in question. I cannot praise this book enough for its many strengths: it brings to life an era that most foreigners, if not most Japanese, are unaware of and sheds a different sort of light on the radical work of filmmakers who are now most often seen to be part of the establishment in Japanese film history. Most importantly, it is the best riposte to the idea that the Japanese don’t do theory; not only do they do it, but often they engage with radical theory before it is translated into English. In documenting this, Furuhata reminds us of the Japan that is often occluded through our engagement with its translated and often remediated media. The Japan westerners frequently encounter in translation often veers between the poles of violent, exotic, erotic images, and sometimes strangely tame and conservative, yet still orientalist, depictions of contemporary life. Neither pole does justice to a past that, even before the 1960s, saw Japanese filmmakers engaged with, acting on, and innovating beyond the most profound and important theorising on what an image was and could do. Furuhata not only illuminates this era, but brilliantly analyses a radical movement whose effects can be traced in contemporary film, anime, manga, and television representations. Cinema of actuality sets a new standard of scholarly excellence in Japanese film studies and is a book to go on all our reading lists.

The wisdom of living in this place will be lost

These are the reflectins of Lipholo Bosielo as he contemplated leaving his village in the foothills of Lesotho’s Maluti Mountains, prior to the construction of the Mohale Dam. He had been born in and had raised his family in Molika-liko, a mountain valley, which was to be inundated by the dam’s reservoir. He was interviewed in late 1997, when he was 67, some six months before the Lesotho government initiated the resettlement plan. As a young man, recently married, he had left Molika-liko each year to take contract work in the South African mines, as did many men of his generation. Working conditions were tough and he contracted an infection in his legs that forced him to give up mining and continued to cause him great pain. Since the 1960s he had supported his family by farming, basket-making, mending shoes, and transporting cattle and goods to markets for others. His wife brewed beer and made brooms.

The people’s place became the animals’ place

Sixty-year-old Maruta Diyonga gave this interview from his home in the small settlement of Kaputura in Botswana’s Okavango Panhandle. He belonged to one of many groups of San in Botswana who had been removed from lands to which they had a long-term attachment but which had been redesignated as commercial farms, cattle ranches, and wildlife management and reserve areas. As a result of removal and exclusion from their traditional lands, they found themselves, according to Maruta, without a voice, dependent on others, living in poorly serviced settlements with neither the training to take up employment, nor the possibility of pursuing important aspects of their previous way of life.

I have lost status in my community

Roba Dakota is an Orma pastoralist who has spent most of his life grazing the dry lands of Kenya’s Coast Province with herds of livestock. Interviewed in 1999 at the age of 50, he described how five years earlier his whole world changed when his community was forced off their dry-season grazing area in the floodplains of the Tana River. The land had been taken over for a large-scale rice irrigation scheme by the Kenyan government’s Tana and Athi Rivers Development Authority (TARDA). Roba Dakota and others interviewed explained how there was minimal warning or negotiation about what was to come. His community went from disbelief to defiance until they were finally evicted by the state: “Soldiers were brought to evict us forcefully … There was no way we could ask for compensation because we were just chased away.”

I do not have the cleverness for here

Prior to resettlement, ’Matsapane Tsapane, 56, had taken over from her husband the position of village head of Ha Tsapane, a small community in the foothills of Lesotho’s Maluti Mountains. Their highland village was one of several in the valley of Molika-liko that were relocated prior to construction of the Mohale Dam. Her husband, Lebeko, was confused and distressed at the thought of resettlement and had relied on his wife to handle the compensation arrangements.

We had a set way of life. All that has been disturbed

Noshad Khan Tareen was in his late teens in 1976 when he and his family were forced to leave the village of Jattoo located in the Tarbela Valley. Situated close to the banks of the Indus River, in what was formerly Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, Jattoo was one of about 120 long-established agricultural communities that were submerged by the reservoir of the Tarbela Dam. Around 96,000 people were displaced as a consequence of the dam, reservoir, and associated infrastructure, which was 20 percent more than originally estimated.1 Most were subsistence farmers—tenants or landowners—with a small percentage working as artisans or semi-skilled workers, often following hereditary occupations such as blacksmiths, barbers, potters, cobblers, and musicians. Fishermen and boatmen—boats were the main form of local transport—worked the rivers.

Our fields have gone, our lifestyle has changed

Interviewed in 2001, some 15 years after Central Coalfields Limited (CCL) began to take over the agricultural land used by his community, Sadhan Prajapati described the enormous changes that mining had brought to the villagers of Benti, where he grew up, and the surrounding areas. The Damodar Valley, where Benti lies, is in Jharkhand state and contains huge reserves of coal, and the land and homes of many communities have been lost to the vast open-pit mines and heavy infrastructure of CCL.