‘Unpacking’ the narrative of a national housing policy in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The article ‘unpacks’ the major policy narrative on housing in Sri Lanka, namely that there is One National Housing Policy (ONHP). Housing schemes have been part of poverty alleviation strategies designed to solve problems of internal displacement due to war, and more recently as part of the major recovery initiatives after the Indian Ocean tsunami event in 2004. The housing policy narrative is explored in a resettlement programme (1970s to date), in a case of war-induced internal displacement (1990s – early 2000), and in post-tsunami recovery (from 2005). The authors ask whether successful practices from the past have been incorporated into the post-tsunami recovery efforts. Although similar in structure and implementation processes – all highly centralised, technocratic, bureaucratic, and top-down – each scheme has its own policy narrative which is based on different local contexts and experiences. Housing plans are never neutral, but embedded in existing situations of tension and are highly politicised. New to the post-tsunami situation is that the housing policy has not sufficiently embedded the reconstruction practices in local realities and people's own preferences and contributions. Ignorance among international organisations about previous housing policies and power relations has led to a silent acceptance of the ONHP.

Keywords:

• policy narratives
• post-tsunami housing
• Sri Lanka

Notes

1. Equal authorship.

2. It is common to name 'settlers’ those who came to the resettlement schemes. Displaced persons have become the common term for the conflict-induced displacees. During the 1990s, with increasing emphasis on displacement both by the international community and national actors, the term displaced people is used on a wider set of people moving under different degrees of force within Sri Lanka.

3. R. Lund ‘What can we learn from previous Sri Lankan experiences? The case of the Accelerated Mahaweli Programme’. NTNU/FORUT international workshop on housing, 26–27 May 2005, Colombo. Unpublished.

4. Recently (during 2007) the World Bank started a new initiative in Puttalam to relocate IDPs. This process has not been included in the discussion presented here.

5. With respect to the ideas behind the buffer zone as a policy and how it affected the housing strategies after the tsunami, we refer to our Ampara example presented in the following discussion, and also Hyndman's article (2009, this Issue).