This reflection draws on the author's role as principal drafter and lead for the development of the IASC Policy on the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons, endorsed in November 2024.
The IASC Policy on the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons, endorsed in November 2024, is the most substantive update to the international humanitarian system's framework for IDP protection in a quarter century. As its principal drafter and the person who led its development, I know what it was designed to do — and what it was designed to reach beyond. Rereading it now, against a humanitarian landscape defined by funding contraction, operational retrenchment, and intensifying pressure to return to basics, raises a question the policy itself cannot answer: what happens to a framework designed to push the system toward governance when the system is retreating toward delivery?
The policy is more ambitious than its predecessors in ways that matter. It moves beyond emergency response toward durable solutions as a protection objective from the outset. It assigns responsibility to development, peace, and human rights actors alongside humanitarian ones. It calls explicitly for IDPs to have access to national systems and public services — not as a long-term aspiration but as a measurable protection outcome.
It was drafted against the backdrop of two independent reviews: one finding that protection, including specifically for IDPs, had yet to be meaningfully implemented across the IASC system despite successive policy cycles; another finding that the humanitarian response to internal displacement was too slow, too process-focused, and too disconnected from what displaced people actually needed.
Those findings matter because they are not findings about the absence of policy. They are findings about the gap between policy and outcome in a system that has had strong protection policy for years. The IASC Protection Policy of 2016 established centrality of protection as a system-wide commitment. The 2013 Principals' Statement said the same. Each reform cycle has produced stronger normative language and clearer operational guidance. And yet the gap persisted — not because the commitments were wrong, but because the structural conditions required to make them operational were not being addressed.
This is precisely the moment the humanitarian system has chosen to go back to basics.
The logic of retrenchment is understandable. With humanitarian funding at its most constrained in decades, agencies face impossible choices about what to sustain. Basic delivery — food, shelter, medical care, physical protection — commands the clearest mandate and the most defensible use of reduced resources. The more ambitious elements of the policy — engagement with fiscal systems, support for national system integration, groundwork for durable solutions — require sustained investment, multi-actor coordination, and time horizons that emergency financing cannot accommodate. Under pressure, systems default to what they were built for.
But the back-to-basics retreat, however operationally rational, exposes something the policy was designed to address and cannot resolve alone. Internal displacement is increasingly protracted, urban, and structurally produced — not a temporary emergency condition that humanitarian delivery can resolve, but a governance condition that persists because the institutional architecture of states is not designed to absorb it.
The policy is right that durable solutions require development actors, fiscal integration, and mandate continuity across displacement phases. The problem is that none of those things are within the humanitarian system's power to deliver — and contracting humanitarian budgets make the gap between what the policy requires and what the system can provide more visible, not less.
What the current moment reveals is that the policy's most important provisions are precisely those most vulnerable to retrenchment — and that their vulnerability reflects not a failure of the policy but a structural feature of the humanitarian system itself. Humanitarian policy can name the governance gap. It cannot close it.
Humanitarian policy can name the governance gap. It cannot close it.
The centrality of protection framework, however well implemented, operates within institutional constraints that are shaped by fiscal architecture, sovereign financing systems, and mandate boundaries that humanitarian advocacy cannot restructure.
This is the terrain the Governing Displacement research series is designed to map. The IDP policy I helped draft sets out what protection requires. What it cannot do — and what independent research is positioned to do — is make the case to the actors with leverage over fiscal and governance design that displacement is a structural condition requiring institutional embedding, not a humanitarian caseload requiring periodic response.
As the humanitarian system contracts around its core functions, that case becomes more urgent, not less. The governance gap the policy identifies does not close when humanitarian ambition retreats. It widens.