Risk Communication Interpretation of Resettlement: Case of Southern Transport Development Project in Sri Lanka - Volume 8 Number 2 (Feb. 2018) - IJSSH

Abstract—Resettlement followed by construction projects damages livelihood of many affected households, which causes protests against them making overall projects behind schedule. Southern Transport Development Project (STDP) was the first highway construction project in Sri Lanka and it took unprecedented safeguard measures in order to mitigate negative impacts on affected people and to minimize the delay of construction. In the project, public officers in charge of resettlement communicated and built up relationship with affected people in the process of resettlement, and played a key role in applying various safeguard policy. Through interview with both of public officers and affected people, this research aims to understand dynamic process that public officers made constructive relationship with affected people in STDP as risk communication, seeing whether three important characteristics in risk communication realized in the project: heterogeneous effects of risk communication, two-way information exchange, and existence of two routes of persuasion. Through the interview survey, we confirmed the existence of heterogeneous effects of risk communication in STDP and suggested that ROs/RAs designed strategies of communication based on the stages of resettlement, which can be interpreted by central and peripheral routes of persuasion. Index Terms—Land acquisition, Development-induced resettlement, Resettlement risks, Risk Communication.c So Morikawa is with Department of Civil Engineering, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan (e-mail: morikawa@civil.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp). Takeshi Miura is with Department of Civil Engineering, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan (e-mail: zchallengez1@gmail.com). [PDF] Cite: So Morikawa and Takeshi Miura, "Risk Communication Interpretation of Resettlement: Case of Southern Transport Development Project in Sri Lanka," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 65-68, 2018.