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Chapter Five Challenging the Economics of Displacement Evaluating Risks and Compensating Losses Particularly in the developing world, where communities have been less dissolved into clusters of atomized economic actors, resistance to DFDr challenges the way states, multilaterals, and corporations do business. In many instances, resistance by communities subverts the individualistic economic model of the West. Economics, as constructed in the West, is purportedly about individual choice-making in the application of scarce means to prioritized ends. The market is the primary institution in which these choices are made, and money is the primary means through which they are carried out. However, for many communities, if they define economics as a separate domain at all, it is about provisioning households and communities on land and property that are valued in ways beyond the reach of market calculation. Since large development projects affect entire communities and often networks of communities, opposition frequently comes from communities, even those composed of groups with diverging interests, as well as individuals. In the developed world, displacement and resettlement are often accomplished at the individual level through the mechanism of eminent domain and the purchase of property at market value. However, resistance to this policy is increasingly organized at the community level even in the developed world, challenging the ways business is normally transacted by the state and corporations. If the decisions to displace and resettle people are fundamentally political, the purposes of development projects that displace people are most often deemed to be economic. Despite the cultural and political forces and subtexts (see Chapters 6 and 7) that support their construction, large-scale development projects are ultimately justified on economic grounds. Similarly, in purely economic terms DFDr resistance involves a conflict between the needs of a local society and the purported needs of a regional or national one. Challenging the Economics of Displacement 1 Infrastructure, facilities, services, and resources of various sorts are determined to be essential to the economic development process and deemed to override the rights and needs of people who occupy the terrain necessary for a project. Even in cases where the purported goal is conservation of a natural environment, the discourse of complementarity between good ecology and good economics created by the concept of sustainable development may provide an economic subtext to such projects. Furthermore, the discourse of biodiversity underscores the importance of conservation in economic terms by invoking the necessity of maintaining genetic diversity for the preservation of robustness and resilience of both environmentally and commercially valuable species. Also, secondary economic goals involving selected forms of resource exploitation are often revealed subsequent to reserve demarcation and displacement , as was shown in the Montes Azules case study in the previous chapter. In Chapter 1, I made the point that the state and private capital often seek to relocate people on the basis of the efficient use of resources. That is, it is claimed that the state or private interests can exploit the resources of a place in a more economically efficient fashion than the original residents, producing more value for the society as a whole. The basis for this claim is both technological and organizational, but the underlying concept is that both features are thought to be more efficient in terms of the ratio of invested resources— capital and labor—to the amount of output or product. The goal of efficiency is a basic concept of economics, and it is driving nations to strive to develop by increasing the scale of their enterprises. Efficiency is about the production of value. Resource use is considered to be efficient when the things produced are what people value most highly. In other words, resource use is considered efficient when more of a good cannot be produced without giving up another good that we value even more highly (M. Parkin, 2003, p. 102). This is just a way of saying that the production of value or a valued good is efficient when the process obliges us to forgo fewer other goods that we may also value. Economic efficiency occurs when valued goods are produced at least cost. Closely related to the concept of efficiency is the notion of economies of scale. Dating back to Adam Smith’s original discourses on the advantages of production brought about by the division of labor, economies of scale are present when the cost of production of a single unit of a good falls as the rate of output increases (M. Parkin, 2003, p. 207). Although there are numerous examples to...

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