What it is
The UN Secretary-General's Action Agenda on Internal Displacement sets out a system-wide vision to better resolve, prevent, and address internal displacement. It followed the High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement and places particular emphasis on durable solutions, prevention, data, development engagement, and national ownership.
Governance function
The Action Agenda reframes internal displacement as a cross-cutting governance and development issue rather than a residual humanitarian caseload. It seeks to align national responsibility, UN system support, development financing, prevention, and solutions planning.
Who is included
IDPs in emergency and protracted situations, host communities, people seeking return, local integration, or settlement elsewhere, and populations at risk of future displacement.
Who is left out
People may remain outside if national plans do not recognise them, if displacement data are weak, if solutions are defined narrowly as return, or if financing remains humanitarian and short-term.
Where continuity breaks
Continuity breaks when emergency assistance does not transition into development planning, when local authorities lack resources, when IDP data are not integrated into national statistics, or when solutions strategies lack budget authority.
Why it matters
The Action Agenda is central to the Mapping because it articulates the move from humanitarian response to governance architecture. It asks whether internal displacement can be absorbed into ordinary national systems, local development, prevention, and financing. The political economy archetype is development-system absorption under conditions of national ownership and donor alignment.
Governance coding table
| Political economy archetype | Development-system absorption |
|---|---|
| Responsibility | National governments retain primary responsibility. The UN system, development actors, humanitarian agencies, financial institutions, and local authorities are expected to align behind nationally owned prevention and solutions efforts. |
| Eligibility | Eligibility depends less on a single entitlement rule and more on whether IDPs and affected communities are recognised in national solutions strategies, development plans, local plans, and data systems. |
| Financing | The agenda calls for more predictable development and solutions financing, but does not itself create a financing instrument. Financing must be mobilised through national budgets, development banks, UN programmes, donors, and local planning systems. |
| Data systems | The agenda emphasizes better IDP data, national statistics, and evidence for solutions. Interoperability with civil registration, social protection, local planning, and sectoral data remains the implementation challenge. |
| Delivery system | Delivery depends on national and local institutions, UN country teams, humanitarian operations, development programmes, and sectoral public systems. |
| Portability | Portability is a core requirement for solutions: IDPs need documentation, services, land or housing claims, social protection access, and livelihoods support that survive movement and return. |
| Accountability | Accountability depends on national leadership, UN system coordination, solutions strategies, monitoring, and follow-up mechanisms. Direct entitlements require domestic translation. |
| Time horizon | Medium- to long-term, spanning immediate response, protracted displacement, prevention, durable solutions, and development planning. |