In discussions on migration, a basic distinction is often made between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’
Understanding the politics behind the institutions
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Assignment #11 (Group) Draft research proposal (PART 1)
| Understanding the politics behind the institutions The provision of protection and assistance to refugees and other forced migrants can be conceptualised as a global public good. Although it is not a pure public good, and its benefits are asymmetrically distributed, the benefits of refugee protection are nevertheless partly non- excludable and non-rival between actors. In other words, all states accrue the security and human rights benefits of provision, irrespective of whether they themselves contribute directly to provision, and the benefits are not diminished by another state’s enjoyment of those benefits (Suhrke 1998; Betts 2003). This creates a collective action problem insofar as although states have a shared interest in the availability of protection, they have strong incentives to free ride on the contributions of others. This broadly means there are two ways in which to induce states to contribute to protection. First, through creating institutional mechanisms for cooperation, which could include incentives that are created for long-term reciprocity. Second, by appealing to private interests that accrue not just from provision but also from being the provider, states or other actors may have incentives to contribute, whether for state-specific reasons of security, economic gain, identity or legitimacy. Historically, state and non-state actor contributions to support refugee and forced migrant protection have depended on a combination of these underlying elements of international cooperation (Betts b. The global refugee regime is based upon two core norms asylum and burden-sharing. The former relates to assisting refugees in a state’s own territory. The latter relates to assisting refugees in the territory of another state. The challenge within the existing refugee regime is that asylum is subject to a strongly institutionalised and widely accepted norm, while the burden-sharing is subject to a weakly institutionalised and highly contested norm. In other words, states have a strong obligation to protect refugees who reach their territory but little incentive to support refugees elsewhere in the world. In relation to asylum, states have generally been willing to contribute insofar as doing so maintains the overall refugee regime by fulfilling a reciprocal obligation under international refugee law. Although there has been constant downward pressure on asylum norms, created by domestic politics, states have generally tried to contribute enough to be seen to comply with international law and thereby maintain the overall regime. Furthermore, the institutionalisation of these norms of asylum within domestic legal frameworks has socialised many states into broadly respecting norms of asylum and empowering judiciaries to be a check on domestic political incentives for exclusionary policies. In relation to burden-sharing though, Northern donor states have had significant discretion to choose whether and how they contribute to protection and solutions for refugees in host countries in the South (Betts b. This has led to strong incentives to free ride Alexander Betts 316 on the contributions of host states of first asylum. The imbalance between the norms of asylum and burden-sharing creates a major problem. It means that states that are proximate to human rights-abuses or crisis countries have a strong obligation to admit refugees onto their territory. However, those that are more distant have little incentive to engage in any burden-sharing. This ‘North-South impasse is a cooperation problem that, according to UNHCR, has historically led to inadequate protection and protracted refugee situations in the South, with Northern states not providing enough support for protection and durable solutions. UNHCR has faced the challenge of how to persuade states in the North to make discretionary contributions to its budget and to durable solutions for refugees in the South. It has historically been at its most successful in doing so when it has been able to use what international relations scholars call issue-linkage, connecting refugee protection to a wider set of interests in other policy fields, such as security, development or immigration, in which states have wider interests, or, occasionally, by appealing to values and norms (Betts 2009b). Over time, this logic of appealing to Northern states interests in other policy fields has sometimes been effective in overcoming the North-South impasse. This occurs each year when UNHCR appeals to its donor states to support its programmes around the world, where they receive a combination of earmarked and unearmarked voluntary contributions. UNHCR also successfully creates special initiatives or appeals to address specific crises. In the past it has effectively elicited burden-sharing by creating ad hoc initiatives such as the International Conferences on Refugees in Africa I and II (1981 and 1984), the International Conference on Refugees in Central America (1987–1995), the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees (1988–1996) and the Convention Plus initiative (2003–5). UNHCR has gradually recognised the possibility for the private provision of public goods. Unlike many other policy fields, there has been relatively little academic work on the role of the private sector in forced migration governance. Yet, gradually, this is changing. In 2011 for instance, the IKEA Foundation gave the largest private sector donation in the history of the United Nations to UNHCR to support the organisation’s work on innovation. Furthermore, UNHCR now collaborates with a range of multinational corporations and foundations, motivated by a combination of corporate social responsibility, brand recognition and opportunities to engage in product and process innovation. Beyond multinational corporations, there is also a recognition that the private sector exists at the local, national and transnational levels, including among refugees and forced migrants themselves, in ways that can contribute to protection and assistance (Betts et al. 2014). IDP assistance is characterised by a similar logic. Northern donors have little obligation to provide protection and they need to be persuaded based on interests (such as the containment of potential refugees) or values. However, the politics of IDP protection also has some notable differences. Host states are the countries of origin and the people being protected are their citizens. This creates a variety of different situations in which affected countries may welcome assistance or, in the case of internal conflict, maybe reluctant to allow the international community access to areas held by opposition rebel groups. At an international level, one of the challenges has been the dissemination of the standards contained within the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. The principle mechanism of socialisation has been the incorporation of soft law within domestic law and regional legal frameworks, such as the Kampala Convention of the African Union, the first regional treaty relating directly to the rights of IDPs. Yet, even where these standards have been legally adopted, they have not been uniformly implemented (Orchard 2014b). |