Investigation of Rural Participation in Relocation of Rural Settlements Case Study: Relocated villages in south Kerman province in Iran

In most post-disaster reconstruction programs, the policy of relocation of some parts or the whole settlement area is technically considered as a suitable solution for the risk reduction and safety against some phenomena such as earthquake, flood, landslide, etc. Studying different experiences reveals that due to the lack of rules and guidelines on how to intervene in rural settlements and also lack of a comprehensive definition of the concepts of in-situ reconstruction and relocation in intervention policies, ambiguity in the application of these approaches and lack of participation of the rural people in new village reconstruction process is such that the relocated survivors are generally not satisfied with relocation and it has often led to the loss of rural people's self-reliance and their loss of place attachment and in some cases, the constructed units in the new village are left unsettled. The theoretical literature study shows that the experts define the concept of participation somehow differently. Overall, the definition of participation in the present paper is based on collective wisdom and indigenous knowledge and it is a conscious and voluntary activity which is accomplished by participation of the beneficiaries in all aspects of decision-making, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation with the aim of empowering them by higher efficiency. This research seeks to illustrate the concept of rural people's participation in the process of relocation and reconstruction of rural settlements. Since the total study population was 16 villages relocated in south of Kerman province with 538 constructed units and all of which were not possible to be studied due to the study limitation, it was attempted to select a sample out of the population using exact statistical technology to over generalize the obtained results to the whole population with a logical reliability. Accordingly, using the random sampling, 4 out of 16 relocated villages in Kerman Province were selected and by using Cochran relation, 150 constructed units were surveyed via simple random sampling. The findings suggest that there is a direct relationship between participation of the rural people and their settlement in the new village in decision-makings on relocation, location selection, design, construction and monitoring the construction of the new village. Meanwhile, there is a direct relationship between the distance of the new village from the old one with vacant units. Further, there is a reverse relationship between the provided services in the new village and the number of vacant units in the new village.