Short course (3 hours) designed to cover the basics of forced migration, host communities, and durables solutions.
Part 3: Response and Solutions
How long do refugee situations last?
A “protracted refugee situation” is one that affects 25,000 people or more and lasts for 5+ years. Different numbers and measures of these populations exist, but what we know for sure is that most refugees are in protracted situations — close to 80%. Some have been in these situations for decades, which amounts to generations of people being born into and growing up in displaced contexts.
Why is this important to know when we have so many emergent forced migration crises? First, many of the “new” crises quickly become protracted. The Syrian refugee crisis, which is fresh in our minds, is already more than 5 years old. Second, as the UNHCR explained in a 2004 Standing Committee meeting, protracted situations are lead to “wasted lives, squandered resources, and future problems.” And some of those “future problems” are more conflict, and more displacement–a vicious cycle.
The duration of these protracted situations average between 10 and 20 years. Their durations make host community achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals extremely challenging, adding to further destablizations and humanitarian burdens. Here’s a graphic from 2016 about protracted situations, and you can see that many are still around even today.
How do we prevent this in the first place?
One possible way to think about how to prevent protracted refugee situations is to think about how humanitarian aid is delivered and coordinated in the first place. We can look at humanitarian aid networks to see that the rise of private donors and over-reliance on traditional aid actors (like the US) can become problematic for sustaining long-term situations. This points to the importance, and also complications, of relying on private donors because they can be unstable over time, do not contribute nearly as much money as state actors, and may not sustain the same types of connections with operations on the ground.
But taking a closer look at private donors also introduces a timeline of events unfolding during a crisis in which many undocumented, small-scale humanitarian actors are on the scene providing uncoordinated aid. While this can be beneficial at meeting emergent needs, the long-term success of these organizations–or their longevity in general–is still an area of research. We do not fully understand how these organizations help or hinder the humanitarian aid response.
These structures, and their evolution over time, that are set up during an emergency response and as the situation evolves into protraction may play a part in how protraction comes to be in the first place. Since most refugee situations become protracted (more than 5 years), humanitarian response shouldn’t be thought of as an emergency triage. It is the setup for what could be a long-term effort. This is even more complicated as the number of refugees increases, and the global donor fatigue creates declining aid contributions addressing even larger numbers of crises.
When we look to characterize the situation of forced migration response, one thing that we start to see is the rise of informal organizations. The communication and coordination with these “rogue” agencies can supplement international aid response, but can also become burdensome and messy for ensuring a coordinated response that makes the best use of available resources. Look at this agent-based model to see how different strategies of these “rogue” humanitarian organizations can help to fulfill or impede fulfillment of humanitarian needs depending on how much they coordinate with one another.
What are the solutions?
Currently, the UNHCR organizes potential solutions as “durable solutions:” return to country of origin; local integration into the host community; and resettlement abroad. We can see lots of examples of each of these types of solutions. In Colombia, the president recently announced significant measures to regularize Venezuelan migrants in the country, accepting that this situation wouldn’t resolve in the near future. But this is not the norm. There have to be more ways–and most solutions are a combination of ways–because less than 1% of all forcibly displaced persons see a long-term solution each year. As the number of forced migrants climb, this is simply not fast enough.
Link to the workshop Part 3 slides: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/7kFm9BTO4fE4KF