Abstract
The UNHCR’s interest in questions concerning environmentally displaced persons (EDP) protection is controversial: The organization is responsible for over 20 million refugees and has already taken up the topic of IDPs. Additionally, the UNHCR’s mandate does not cover the protection of EDPs. Therefore, this analysis will tackle the question: Why, then, does the UNHCR approach the issue of EDPs the way that it does? In this chapter, the empirical puzzle of the UNHCR’s approach to EDPs will be considered. The analysis hereby builds upon the conceptual design developed in Chap. 4 and incorporates primary and secondary data on the UNHCR’s EDP approach, including the findings of the qualitative expert interviews. In order to uncover the underlying impetus of the UNHCR’s approach, the analysis is presented by means of a context-centered interpretation (the influence of the organizational environment, the influence of states, etc.) in chronological order.
We speak about the humanitarian consequences of global climate change as though
we are dealing with a future possibility. Far from it, this is not a possibility […],
this is a certainty. And this is not about the future, this is about now!
(Johnstone 2008a, p. 4)
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Notes
- 1.
For the impact of the COP in Copenhagen on global climate governance, see McGee and Steffek (2016).
- 2.
High Commissioner Sadako Ogata was the first to establish a relationship between refugees and the environment as early as 1992 and she criticized that this relationship had long been overlooked (Ogata 1992). In 2002, the UNHCR published on refugees and the environment, including both the effects of refugee camps on the environment and environmental change as a trigger to become displaced (UNHCR 2002).
- 3.
By looking at the earlier changes that the UNHCR went through regarding its ‘population’, important inferences can be drawn to understand the most recent approach to EDPs. Stateless people were officially assigned as part of the UNHCR’s responsibility in 1975 and this section of the organization’s work is nowadays a well-funded and important scope of work (Crisp 2009, p. 74). The realization of the International Conference on the Protection Mandate of UNHCR in 1998 illustrates that the UNHCR itself was aware of the questions arising due to its ever-increasing workload. During the conference, UNHCR and NGO staff debated whether the organization’s humanitarian activities reflected its mandated protection role (Working Group on International Refugee Policy 1999, p. 397). And the then head of the UNHCR’s Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit, Jeff Crisp, asserted that the organization in fact turned toward the topic of reintegration of displaced populations up until 2000 (Crisp 2001, p. 5). According to Crisp, the UNHCR transformed throughout the 1990s from being refugee-specific and reactive to becoming a broadly-based humanitarian agency with a rather proactive and holistic orientation (Crisp 2001, pp. 6–7). On the topic of its urban refugee policy, the UNHCR also expanded its agenda away from the camp model toward an integrative and community-based model (Ward 2014).
- 4.
The publications only mention ‘natural disasters’ in the context of the IOM’s field of work in the cluster approach.
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Hantscher, S. (2019). The UNHCR and Environmentally Displaced Persons. In: The UNHCR and Disaster Displacement in the 21st Century. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19689-9_5
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