Paper short abstract:

The UN climate change framework recognizes resettlement as a legitimate response to climate change in climate vulnerable areas. This paper presents fieldwork from rural Zambia on how communities respond to such controversial measures, and what the implications are for governance.

Paper long abstract:

The UN climate change framework increasingly recognizes that resettlement of climate vulnerable populations - so-called "planned relocation" - can be a legitimate and necessary response to climate change. The empirical work on such relocation is however still very limited, and most attention has been focussed on the situation in Small Island nations.

However, climate induced resettlement in response to floods is now also emerging in some southern African countries. This happens in a historical context where resettlement is a well known and controversial intervention.

This paper presents fieldwork from rural Zambia on how communities actually respond to such measures, and what the implications are for governance. The paper examines a particular flood resettlement scheme in southern Zambia, exploring the strategies that different households have taken vis-a-vis the scheme, and the community governance scheme that has developed in extension of this.

It shows how some community members have rejected the scheme outright, while others have used it as way to enhance land tenure security by spreading land and institutional relationships across customary and statutory land. It further shows how community members seek to navigate and reshape the institutional framework that governs the resettlement scheme.