Attachments
Steven Goldfinch
Internal displacement—that is the forced movement of people within the country they live in—is at crisis levels. There were 46.9 million internal displacements, or movements, recorded during 2023, across 151 countries. While some of these movements were a result of preemptive evacuation ahead of a disaster, the total number of people living in internal displacement increased by 51 percent over the past five years, reaching a record high of 75.9 million people across 116 countries at the end of 2023. Unlike refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) are, as citizens, the primary responsibility of their State and enjoy the same rights as other citizens. However, as displacement results from conflicts, disasters, and climate change, often linked to poverty and other vulnerabilities, IDPs are often invisible.
At the end of 2024, against this backdrop, the Office of the Special Adviser on Solutions to Internal Displacement reached the end of its 30-month mandate to strengthen and accelerate action on solutions to internal displacement from across the United Nations (UN) system.
With the office now closed, this note provides an overview of the UN Secretary-General’s efforts to raise awareness and reframe internal displacement, and to improve the UN’s performance in supporting Member States to reduce, prepare for, and provide solutions to the millions of internally displaced.
Raising global attention, reframing internal displacement
The Office of the Special Adviser on Solutions to Internal Displacement was established in response to the September 2021 report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement. Precipitated by a letter from 57 Member States calling on the Secretary-General to “act on the need for increased global attention in support of IDPs,” the panel—co-led by Donald Kaberuka and Federica Mogherini—was established in 2019 to identify concrete recommendations on how to better prevent, respond, and achieve solutions to the global internal displacement crisis.
The report, commissioned by the Secretary-General rather than being a Member State-led process, called on States—as part of their sovereign duty—to do better, for the international financial institutions (IFIs) and the private sector to step-up, and for the UN to get organized and accountable for solutions.
The panel found a “collective failure to prevent, address and resolve internal displacement.” It made 10 recommendations comprising 79 actions to re-design the approach to internal displacement around a development framing. It called for a fundamental shift in the way States and the international community understand and address displacement, moving away from short-term humanitarian responses, currently costing $6-7 billion annually, to address the root causes and finding durable solutions.
When accepting the report in 2021, the Secretary-General noted that the international community’s approach to internal displacement was “extremely fragmented,” that strategies, policies, and measures to empower the internally displaced were absent, and that the UN had insufficient institutional mechanisms in place for the effective coordination of durable solutions.
Given the report was not part of an intergovernmental process, there was no built-in follow-up mechanism on the recommendations made to Member States, financiers, and civil society. As such, it was left to the Secretary-General to take forward the recommendations made to the UN system (Figure 1).