Session 2: Crisis generators: situations impacting protection/protection solutions
The goals of this session were to discuss the situations that impact protection and protection solutions, including:
- conflicts and disasters
- scarcity, climate change and displacement
- urbanization and urban refugees (increasing human flows to urban sites – challenge of service provision given mixed populations of refugees, IDPs, migrants, local residents)
Presenter: Susan Martin, Georgetown University
Chair: Mark Schnellbaecher, Catholic Relief Services
Question: Given these and other issues, do we need to re-frame our approach to the protection of refugees and displaced people? If yes, what needs to change and how? If not, why not?
PDF of Session 2 Crisis Generators Discussion Notes
SUMMARY
Overall, participants felt there was a need to reframe our approach. Some participants recommended that a sensitivity to protection issues be reinforced much earlier on. Others stressed the need to work with communities to help them understand their own responsibility to protect themselves in addition to understanding our responsibility. The discussions about reframing our approach led to questions about rights, specifically:
- What are the rights of families in refugee resettlement?
- Who decides which groups qualify?
- Who decides what family members can “follow to join”?
- Do they have the right to return? Or should it be the right to decide to return?
Coordination between faith-based and secular NGOs was one theme that came out of the question, “What needs to change and how?” Participants talked about the need to:
- Increase coordination and collaboration.
- Recognize the differentiation in roles and strengths.
- Identify our strengths and, based on this, provide what we are best at, whether it be humanitarian assistance, advocacy for social justice, research, connection to local communities, or whatever we can best contribute.
Participants also looked at an issue raised in the presentation around the three contexts in which crises arise: states willing and able to provide protection and assistance, states willing but unable, and states unwilling to provide protection. Participants made the following points:
- Responses that come from states that are able and willing should be differentiated from those which are unable or unwilling.
- There is another category of “conditionally willing” states that accept aid and allow international presence, but on their own terms.
- Other contexts include statelessness and persons affected by climate change.
- The dispersal of displaced persons creates different challenges for international and state roles. There is no mechanism to prevent states from shirking responsibilities related to both the refugee convention and IDP guidelines.
Photo: David Snyder
On the question of whether we need to re-frame our approach to protection, a few thoughts:
1. Yes, to dramatically re-tool protection and assistance responses to the increasingly urban nature of refugee and asylum populations; this has been significantly advanced, at least conceptually and strategically, with UNHCR’s new policy. The policy and movement however, has centered on refugees and asylum seekers: some of the additional challenges, in many ways more complicated, pertain to others of protection concern, i.e., IDPs, returnees, stateless.
2. For all in urban settings, careful, determined outreach and identification for the delivery of effective protection and assistance is imperative, especially for the most vulnerable that Catholic teaching, charism and mission points us to.
3. Among the broad populations of migrants and displaced, how do we as Catholic actors suggest re-framing the approaches to distinguish the forcibly displaced from those more voluntary. Alternatively perhaps, is vulnerability itself a transversal criteria that can be measured and acted upon in practice?
4. Urban settings raise high the daunting challenge of resource-sharing and program inclusion with respect to “local” or native populations. How much solid research and consensus on “good practice” exists, and how to take it forward?