Research Agenda | Displacement Policy

Displacement is experienced as a continuum, while governance is organised through fixed legal categories, territorial jurisdictions, institutional mandates and financing arrangements.

The result is often institutional discontinuity. Responsibility, eligibility, data, services and financing fail to move with people as they cross borders, jurisdictions, administrative categories and phases of displacement.

Displacement Policy develops research, comparative evidence and policy frameworks to understand these fault lines — and to identify how responsibility and protection can be sustained more effectively over time.

RESEARCH ARCHITECTURE

How the research agenda is organised

Three analytical lenses inform five connected areas of research, linking the diagnosis of institutional discontinuity to questions of inclusion, political economy and reform.

The analytical framework provides a common lens across the research agenda while each area develops a distinct institutional and policy problem.

Areas of Research

Public Systems and Social Protection

Examining whether ordinary public systems can respond not only to shocks, but to mobility.

Research focuses on how social protection, health, education, civil registration and other public systems can maintain access as people move across jurisdictions, administrative categories and phases of displacement.

Key questions include portability of benefits, eligibility across jurisdictions, interoperable registries, identification, duration-sensitive support and the relationship between humanitarian assistance and national systems.

The wider question is whether systems designed around stable populations and fixed administrative categories can maintain protection and access as people move.

Relevant to: social protection, humanitarian policy, health and education systems, civil registration, digital public infrastructure and public service delivery.

Public Finance and Displacement

Examining how displacement-related responsibilities are recognised, allocated and financed through public and sovereign fiscal systems.

Displacement is usually financed as an exceptional event even when its consequences become long-term.

Research focuses on the fiscal architecture underlying displacement: national and subnational budgets, intergovernmental transfers, contingency financing, development finance and other mechanisms through which displacement-related costs and responsibilities are distributed and sustained over time.

A central challenge is the recurrent obligation problem: how to incorporate displacement-related expenditure into ordinary public systems without creating perceptions of unlimited long-term fiscal responsibility.

The research examines how fiscal systems reproduce categorical, temporal and territorial fault lines; how financing arrangements shape incentives for inclusion; and how displacement-related pressures interact with sovereign resilience and fiscal space.

A particular focus is the relationship between governance architecture and financing architecture: identifying the functions that must be sustained, the institutions capable of carrying them, the transition and recurrent costs involved, and the financing instruments appropriate to each stage. This includes development and concessional finance, contingency and risk financing, sovereign financing mechanisms and emerging approaches to financing institutional adaptation and resilience.

Relevant to: public finance, fiscal policy, development finance, sovereign finance, intergovernmental fiscal systems, multilateral development banks and humanitarian financing.

Development, Infrastructure and Displacement

Development investments can generate displacement while also shaping the institutions that respond to it.

This area examines how infrastructure finance, environmental and social safeguards and development-bank operations connect project-based displacement responses with longer-term public responsibility.

The focus extends beyond compensation and project compliance to the institutions that sustain responsibility after project closure: public services, social protection, local government, financing and continuing support for affected populations.

A central question is what happens when project obligations end but displacement-related vulnerability continues.

Relevant to: multilateral development banks, infrastructure finance, environmental and social safeguards, development-induced displacement, public investment and country programming.

Climate, Disasters and Mobility

Climate change and disasters increasingly expose the limitations of systems designed around temporary shocks and fixed populations.

This area examines how adaptive social protection, disaster risk management, anticipatory action, planned mobility and resilience financing can function across the displacement continuum.

The focus is on institutional continuity before, during and after movement — and on how adaptation and resilience systems can reduce the risk that mobility itself creates new forms of exclusion.

Research considers how responsibility, eligibility and financing change as mobility moves across emergency, recovery, relocation and longer-term inclusion.

Relevant to: climate mobility, disaster risk reduction, adaptation, resilience, anticipatory action, planned relocation and loss and damage.

Institutional Design

Displacement often crosses the boundaries through which responsibility is administratively organised.

This area examines what happens when people move between legal statuses, local jurisdictions, national systems and cross-border frameworks.

Research focuses on responsibility allocation, transfers of responsibility across institutions and jurisdictions, territorial governance, local government, regional cooperation and the interaction between legal protection and administrative systems.

It also examines where sector-specific or administrative forms of inclusion may be possible where comprehensive legal status reform is politically constrained.

Relevant to: refugee and IDP protection, migration governance, statelessness, local government, regional institutions, legal policy and public administration.

Analytical Framework

The research agenda is informed by three core concepts: the displacement continuum, sustainable inclusion and political economy.

The Displacement Continuum

Provides a governance diagnostic by shifting attention from status alone towards the points where institutional responsibility breaks down.

Sustainable Inclusion

Describes the direction of reform by asking whether public systems can absorb displacement-related vulnerability while maintaining continuity of responsibility.

Political Economy

Explains why institutional discontinuities persist, where incentives for reform exist, and what forms of institutional change may be feasible.

Explore the Analytical Framework →

FLAGSHIP RESEARCH PROGRAMME

Flagship Research Programme

Financing Displacement Governance

Displacement is often framed as a problem of insufficient financing. The underlying challenge is more fundamental: what governance arrangements is financing intended to sustain, which institutions should carry responsibility, and how should those responsibilities be financed over time?

This programme examines how displacement-related responsibilities can be translated into sustainable institutional and fiscal arrangements. It focuses on the transition from exceptional or externally financed responses to public systems; the allocation of transition and recurrent costs across levels of government and international actors; and the role of development finance, sovereign fiscal frameworks and risk-financing instruments in sustaining responsibility over time.

The research starts from governance functions rather than financing instruments. It asks what functions must continue as displacement becomes prolonged or people move across jurisdictions; which institutions are capable of carrying them; what institutional adaptations are required; what those adaptations cost; and which financing arrangements can make the resulting allocation of responsibility politically and fiscally sustainable.

The programme connects public finance with social protection, infrastructure and development investment, climate and disaster financing, and multilevel governance. Its central question is not simply how to mobilise more financing for displacement, but how financing arrangements shape who carries responsibility, for which functions, for how long and on what terms.

Relevant to: public finance, development finance, sovereign fiscal policy, multilateral development banks, climate and disaster finance, social protection, local government finance and humanitarian financing.

Regional Evidence Base

Southeast Asia Governance Mapping

Displacement Policy’s research agenda is global in scope. Southeast Asia provides its initial regional evidence base and a comparative setting in which to test broader questions about displacement governance.

The Southeast Asia Governance Mapping examines how countries across the region organise responsibility for displacement through laws, institutions, public systems and policy instruments.

Southeast Asia provides a particularly valuable setting for this work. States combine significant administrative capacity and increasingly sophisticated systems for social protection, disaster management, migration governance and public service delivery with diverse legal and political approaches to refugees, internal displacement, statelessness, disasters and mobility.

The mapping identifies where responsibility is assigned, where it becomes fragmented, and how governance systems respond as people move across legal categories, territorial jurisdictions and phases of displacement.

Its purpose is not simply to catalogue policies. It provides an empirical base for comparative research on institutional continuity, sustainable inclusion, public finance and political economy, while generating propositions that can be tested and developed in other regions.

Explore the Southeast Asia Governance Mapping →

Research and Policy Products

Governing Displacement Policy Briefs

Short-form analysis advancing specific institutional and policy propositions.

Working Papers

Longer research developing conceptual, comparative, empirical or technical dimensions of displacement governance.

Southeast Asia Governance Mapping

Regional comparative evidence on how displacement is governed across laws, institutions, public systems and policy instruments.

Perspectives

Contributions from practitioners, policymakers and scholars bringing distinct institutional and disciplinary perspectives into the research agenda.

Comparative and Collaborative Research

Research developed with partners around specific governance, public-system, financing or institutional reform questions.

Policy Dialogue and Convening

Expert discussions and collaborative policy processes designed to connect fields that are often treated separately, test emerging ideas against practice and identify new directions for research.

From Research to Policy Application

Displacement Policy combines independent research with policy application through a developing Displacement Governance Diagnostic. The diagnostic translates the research framework into a structured method for identifying where institutional continuity breaks down and what would be required to sustain responsibility over time.

Applied research can map the displacement trajectory and the governance functions that must continue across it; identify responsible institutions and institutional fault lines; assess political and administrative feasibility; distinguish transition costs from recurrent responsibilities; and develop context-specific institutional and financing pathways.

The objective is not to prescribe standardised solutions. It is to connect comparative research with practical reform questions:

Where does governance fail to follow people?
Why do those gaps persist?
Which institutions are capable of sustaining responsibility?
What changes are politically and fiscally feasible?
How can those changes be financed and sustained over time?

Depending on the context, applied work may therefore include institutional and system diagnostics, political-economy analysis, fiscal and financing architecture, comparative reform options and structured policy dialogue. These applications also generate evidence through which the wider Governing Displacement framework can be tested and refined.

Such work may be developed with governments, development institutions, international organisations, researchers and practitioners while remaining grounded in Displacement Policy’s independent research agenda.

Purpose of the Research Agenda

The purpose of the research agenda is to move beyond treating displacement primarily as an exceptional humanitarian problem.

Displacement Policy asks instead how states and public institutions organise responsibility over time — where that responsibility becomes fragmented, how it is financed, and what governance arrangements can make protection and solutions more continuous, sustainable and institutionally embedded.