From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National - Brookings

CHAPTER 1 Assessing National Approaches to Internal Displacement: Findings from 15 Countries
commitment of the international community, but the
reality is that international attention and resources are
only likely to decrease over time, thus shifting greater
responsibility on the government, where, indeed, responsibility
to secure durable solutions ultimately lies.
The empirical evidence of this survey has underscored
the importance of establishing other key conditions—
security of land tenure, economic opportunities, infrastructure
and public services—in order to ensure that
the solutions that IDPs choose are sustainable. Land and
property disputes are almost always sources (or manifestations)
of lingering conflict and often an obstacle to
IDPs’ free exercise of their right to return. While some
governments have made efforts to provide mechanisms
for property restitution or compensation, those mechanisms
have rarely been adequate to deal—at least in a
timely manner—with the scale and complexity of the
claims presented.
While the Framework for National Responsibility identifies
three durable solutions—return, local integration
and settlement elsewhere in the country—the fifteen
countries surveyed herein reflect a global tendency to
emphasize return. Yet for solutions to be voluntary, IDPs
must be able to choose among them, and local integration
or settlement elsewhere in the country may in fact
be some IDPs’ preferred solution. Indeed, especially in
situations of protracted displacement, those may be the
only feasible solutions, at least until sustainable return
becomes a possibility. And while governments by and
large prefer return, existing surveys of IDP preferences
revealed more nuanced results as examined in this
benchmark analysis. In all of the countries analyzed in
this report and in other countries throughout the world,
more attention must be given to alternatives to return,
including the option of local integration in the place
of displacement, particularly in cases of protracted
displacement. 144
144 Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, Resolving
Internal Displacement: Prospects for Local Integration, June
2011 (www.brookings.edu/events/2011/01_protracted_
displacement.aspx).
156
Return of IDPs is frequently a highly politicized issue.
That is true in several cases, including Georgia, Sudan
and Iraq, given the real or perceived implications for the
demographic composition which returns would affect
and the potential for return to increase conflicts over
the political status or self-determination of a territory.
Moreover, as time drags on, if there is no change in
circumstances that permits durable solutions, solutions
may become more difficult to implement. For example,
land and property issues, always complicated for IDPs,
can become more difficult to resolve over time as land
records are lost, people with knowledge of customary
land entitlements die, and traditional land markers are
eroded or disappear. Also, as is well documented elsewhere,
generational differences emerge as, for example,
children resist returning to communities that they have
never known or find that displacement in urban areas
offers better access to public services and income-generating
opportunities. Such benefits may be difficult to
refuse, especially if the development or reconstruction
of rural infrastructure has stagnated.
By contrast, in other cases, the passage of time may lead
to an easing of communal tensions that makes return
possible. In the best of cases, political conditions change
and peace agreements become possible, opening up the
way for returns, although by no means will return be
immediate. Thus in South Sudan, in spite of the protracted
displacement occurring over decades, the signing
of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement opened the
way for hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese
to return to the South in subsequent years. Similarly, in
spite of long years of displacement in Northern Uganda,
political conditions changed over time, allowing the
return of the vast majority of IDPs.
In all of the case studies, it is striking how little is known
about returns in spite of the fact that return is the solution
most often supported by governments. In some cases,
there are detailed reports of individuals or communities
returning to their areas of origin at a particular point in
time. But for the most part, neither the United Nations
nor governments seem to have a precise handle on how
many have returned, the locations where they settle or the