In discussions on migration, a basic distinction is often made between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’

Global governance and forced migration three questions, what are the institutions that regulate responses to forced migration (institu-
tional), why do these institutions exist in the way they do (political) and how can we think about the adequacy of these institutions (normative)?
The institutions that regulate responses
The modern refugee regime was a product of its time, created in the aftermath of World War II to address displacement in Europe resulting from the Holocaust. Building upon the precursor of UNHCR, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (LNHCR) over the interwar years (Skran 1995; Orchard a, the United Nations developed a formal multilateral framework for the protection of people outside their country of origin because of a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, or membership of asocial group. Based on the principle of intergovernmental reciprocity, the 1951 Refugee Convention defined who is a refugee and the rights to which such people would henceforth be entitled. Alongside this, the 1950 Statute of the UNHCR created a dedicated organisation to support states in providing refugees access to protection and solutions. UNHCR was given a supervisory responsibility for ensuring implementation of the Convention (Betts
et al. 2012). The refugee regime was initially limited in scope. The 1951 Convention applied only to people displaced as a result of events prior to January 1951, and only within geographical Europe. Furthermore, UNHCR was initially created with a limited staff, no dedicated budget and a time-limited mandate. Yet, in over more than six decades, UNHCR has gradually undergone a process of expansion and change. Its mandate has changed significantly in terms of who it protects and how it protects. Who it protects has expanded from refugees to include stateless persons, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and victims of natural disaster, for example. How it protects has expanded from providing legal advice to providing large-scale assistance.
UNHCR’s evolving mandate has been characterised by a number of historical turning points. First, it secured the backing of the US government, from which it initially received no funding whatsoever, during the s by proving its worth in early Cold War crises in Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956. Second, it expanded its mandate from Europe to the rest of the world, initially through responding to particular crises and then formally through the 1967 Protocol to the 1951 Convention. Third, it assumed an expanded role in humanitarian assistance and refugee camp management in the sands. Fourth, it adopted growing responsibility for IDP protection from the s. Fifth, it began to provide protection and assistance to victims of natural disasters from the early s (Betts et al. 2012). This process of UNHCR evolution has been underpinned by a combination of changing donor state interests, the changing nature of displacement, a growing competition from other organisations and the initiative and ambition of successive High Commissioners. A significant debate has been the extent to which change and evolution have been driven by states or by the autonomy of the organisation to define its own trajectory based on using its moral and expert authority to influence governments (Loescher 2001). It seems clear that while
UNHCR has been embedded within wider structures of changing power and interests in the international system, the individual figure and leadership of the High Commissioners for Refugees have mattered for the institutional evolution of the regime. Importantly, refugee governance has also developed on a regional basis. A number of regional organisations have developed institutional frameworks and treaties that supplement the 1951 Convention and adapt the definition of a refugee to suit the regional context.

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The 1969 Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Convention, the 1984 Cartagena Declaration for the Americas and the 2004 European Council Directive all notably supplement the refugee framework. The OAU Convention, for instance, also protects people fleeing a serious disturbance to public order in whole or in part of the country. The European Council Directive offers protection to people fleeing forms of inhuman, cruel or degrading treatment that may not amount to persecution. It is also important to note that a separate organisation, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians in the Near Middle East
(UNRWA), protects Palestinian refugees displaced as a result of events stemming from the
1948 Arab-Israeli War. Alongside these developments in the refugee regime, there has been significant wider institutional development relevant to the governance of refugees and forced migration. At the time of its inception, UNHCR was relatively isolated among international institutions working on either humanitarianism or migration. Subsequent to its creation, however, we have seen the proliferation of a range of other institutions. New international institutions have emerged across migration, humanitarianism, security and human rights. Many of these have overlapped in important ways with the refugee regime, some being complementary and others contradictory to the scope and purpose of the refugee regime (Betts For example, developments in international human rights law have provided sources of complementary protection to refugees (McAdam 2007). In national jurisprudence, the Convention Against Torture (CAT) and the European Convention on Human Rights
(ECHR) have been increasingly used as sources of protection and to uphold the right to
non-refoulement (not to be returned to a country where a person has a well-founded fear of persecution. Meanwhile, other developments in global governance have arguably had a more ambiguous effect on the refugee regime. Global migration governance has developed rapidly, especially through the expansion of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)’s work and the so-called Regional Consultative Processes (RCPs), which increasingly enable states to cooperate on the development of immigration control measures (Betts 2012). Crucially, these wider developments in global governance highlight the difference between refugee governance and governance that affects refugees (Landau and Amit 2014). Reflecting this, it has been suggested, drawing upon ideas in international relations on regime complexity that it may now make more sense to conceptualise the refugee regime as a refugee regime complex. This is one in which overlapping governance across, migration, security, humanitarianism, development, and human rights shape outcomes for refugees and other displaced populations (Betts 2010). Beyond refugees, other institutional frameworks have emerged to protect particular categories of forced migrants. The 1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement represent a soft law framework. Rather than creating new hard law norms, it consolidates existing international human rights law and humanitarian law standards into a single nonbinding document. On an organisational level, this normative framework has been subject to a number of different structural arrangements. In the immediate aftermath of its creation, it was subject to a collaborative approach within which UNHCR took lead responsibility for coordinating different agencies to engage in protection and assistance. Since 2005, however,
IDP assistance has been subject to the cluster approach whereby humanitarian response is coordinated around particular lead agencies for particular sectors. This has given UNHCR global responsibility for leading the protection cluster for IDPs and other non-refugee displaced populations while other agencies take the lead on different sectoral areas such as shelter, water, sanitation and hygiene or child protection, for example.

Global governance and forced migration It is also important to be aware that a range of international institutions touches upon other aspects of forced migration. Meanwhile, human trafficking is subject to the 2000 Palermo Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime
(UNTOC). The 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions are overseen by UNHCR and yet, until recently, have been relatively neglected in aspects of global governance. An emerging debate has begun on how to protect people displaced internally or across borders by environmental displacement. The Nansen Initiative represents a recent informal state-led process to try to develop standards and practices relating to displacement in the context of natural disaster.

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