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Rethinking return: Lessons from Colombia, Liberia and Nigeria

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By Alejandro Abisambra Castillo, Paloma Bellatin, Margo Berends, Samantha BonenClark, Jasmine Dehghan, Varsha Gandikota, Matej Jungwirth, James Kiawoin, Luke Strathmann, and Tim Weedon

Executive Summary

At the end of 2017 an estimated 68.5 million forcibly displaced people (FDPs) had been driven from their homes across the world, including 25.4 million refugees and over 40 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDP). This report examines the challenges of implementing programs and policies in post-conflict settings and the factors that contribute to whether and how FDPs return. The report draws on student-led research trips to Colombia, Liberia and Nigeria, and highlights differences in the duration, nature, and stage of conflict, as well as levels of state capacity.

Government responses to FDP crises depend on pre-existing institutional structures, which often determine if the government’s coordination will be fully centralized or delegated to sub-national authorities. This also influences the degree of involvement by the international community and other actors. Throughout this report, we consider how variation in institutional arrangements lead to different policy responses, beginning with Nigeria as a case of de-centralized response, moving on to Colombia as a mixed approach, and ending with Liberia as an example of centralized response.

With the degree of centralization and the institutional frameworks as a backdrop, we highlight implications for programming strategy by international actors and potential tensions of adopting certain response approaches. Some of these include:

  • The institutionalization of resource-sharing structures between returnees and other community members to limit tensions due to preferential access to resources.

  • Given the inevitable long tail of return, investing in local institutions to support sustainable programming.

  • Providing more accurate and timely information, as well as more opportunities to facilitate informal communication channels or return decisions.

  • Setting and clearly communicating realistic programming timelines to ensure that FDPs’ expectations will be met.

  • Formal inclusion of FDPs in the decision-making structure to improve the programmatic response to displacement.

As part of IOM’s work to expand its Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) tool in northeast Nigeria, our final section focuses on return indicators and data that would enable differentiation between a return that is durable and a return that is just another displacement in a new location. Appendix I proposes a new framework and set of indicators to build on IOM’s DTM in order to understand:

  • How people are returning, and where people have moved to;

  • How to ensure that where people return amounts to a durable solution; and

  • Which indicators are most strongly linked to people staying? i.e., what are the indicators that are most correlated with durable returns?

These indicators are linked to the eight durable solutions criteria in the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Framework on Durable Solutions for Internally Displaced Persons, and are used to construct a weighted index that can help IOM and its partners prioritize funding and programming.