Community Engagement and Lottery Efficiency: Learning from Nepal

What is the role of community preferences in driving the viability of village relocation programs following natural disasters? Nepal’s post-2015 earthquake village resettlement program, an effort to shift high-risk communities to safer, previously unsettled, locations provides a setting in which to examine this question. A key challenge in this program is how to fairly and transparently allocate new private residential space to households, while maintaining individual and overall community satisfaction with the relocation effort. In response, the government plans to administer a land lottery, which is selected via local plebiscite, in each affected village. This paper focuses on a potential driver behind the popularity of different lottery types, social preferences, and seeks to understand its implications for community engagement efforts supporting the plot allocation process.