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You are here: Home arrow About INDR arrow Search Member Profiles arrow Barbara Rose Johnston
Barbara Rose Johnston Profile Page
Barbara Rose Johnston
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Online Status OFFLINE
Member Since 10/28/2007 23:20:36
Last Online 01/14/2008 03:01:43
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Additional Info

Website: gate.cruzio.com/~cns/fellows/bjohnston.html
Occupation: Senior Research Fellow
Company: Center for Political Ecology
Address: P.O. Box 8467
City: Santa Cruz
State: California
Zip Code: 95061
Phone #: 831-335-1769
Short Statement: A significant factor in failed mitigation programs involves the inability to adequately identify, assess, and provide meaningful remedy for the individual, household, and community losses and consequential damages of involuntary resettlement. Land for land, or asset for asset replacement strategies do not begin to compensate for the broader array of losses experienced by households and communities.
I believe that equitable resolution to the legacy issues of failed development schemes may be achieved if damage assessments and valuation strategies expand from the current remedial framework (identifying individual property rights, assessing the damages associated with the individual losses of quantifiable assets, and providing replacement assets or compensation reflecting market value losses) by developing and adopting holistic damage assessment and valuation strategies reflecting individual and communal rights, traditions, experiences, and the material means that sustain a way of life. And while it is all but impossible to provide a parallel communal universe as remedial compensation for the loss of homeland, "loss of a way of life" assessments suggest participatory process in defining losses and assessing consequential damages, and identifying and prioritizing locally-relevant remedies. Meaningful community participation in damage assessment and remedial planning may allow the community to move from an identify of powerless victim towards an identity of empowered, viable community.
As to the question of how to provide compensation in ways that allow implementation of remedial actions over time, I think there is great promise in the formation of independent community improvement foundations initially financed with development funds and sustained through income generated by development operations, especially where community roles are defined through transparent negotiating processes and protected by contractual relationships. I encourage colleagues to critically assess those examples that currently exist, for example -- the mixed record of the Pehuen Foundation established to provide social development funds to dam-affected communities on the BioBio River in Chile, and the new generation of revenue sharing contracts between Cree Tribes and James Bay Hydroelectric Dam authorities.
Displacement Experience: Career focus: documenting human rights abuse and environmental crises associated with development, militarism, and globalization, with an emerging focus on reparations and the right to remedy. Recent experience with displacement includes research, expert witness, and advisor for the People of Rongelap, Marshall Islands in their claim for damages from involuntary resettlement, loss of use, environmental contamination, and related human subject experimentation associated with the United States Nuclear Weapons Testing Program.
Publications: "Reparations and the Right to Remedy." World Commission on Dams briefing paper (July 2000). Contributing Report, Thematic Review 1.3: Displacement, resettlement, reparations, and development.
This paper can be downloaded as an Adobe Acrobat PDF at http://www.damsreport.org/docs/kbase/contrib/soc221.pdf.
Accomplishments: Prepared the "Reparations and Right to Remedy" briefing for the World Commission on Dams (2000). Current work: supporting consequential damage/community needs assessment efforts of Chixoy Dam-affected communities in Guatemala addressing the legacy issues associated with forced relocation and related massacres.
Highest Degree: Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 1987

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