Rethinking Global Protection: New Channels, New Tools, MPI report

A new report from the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration, Rethinking Global Protection: New Channels, New Tools, sketches the sources of strain on the international protection regime and outlines two new avenues that have the potential to reinvigorate it: development- and international mobility-focused approaches. 

Embedding development in humanitarian responses focuses on empowering refugees, in cooperation with host communities, to provide for their own livelihoods by granting them the right to work and opening access to land, equipment, training, and capital. The second approach would open channels of international mobility, including labor migration schemes and international study and training programs, to refugees and other forced migrants. 

“Incorporating development and mobility approaches to protection into international cooperative efforts could prove to be an effective way to create a more sustainable and dynamic response to forcible displacement,” writes Kathleen Newland, who leads MPI’s humanitarian protection work. 

The report is the fourth in a seven-part series that draws from a recent Transatlantic Council meeting, “Refitting the Global Protection System to Meet the Challenges of Modern Crises.” Earlier reports focus on the protection challenge for Syrian refugees in Turkey and unaccompanied minors from Central America, as well as the increasing mismatch between the frameworks that define the existing protection regime and the contemporary patterns of forced displacement. Read earlier reports in the series here. Later this week, MPI will release a release a policy brief by former UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees T. Alexander Aleinikoff that suggests a “paradigm slide” to deal with protracted refugee situations. 

Read the Newland report at: http://migrationpolicy.org/research/rethinking-global-protection-new-channels-new-tools.