This insightful article examines durable solutions programming to conflict and climate-related displacement in the Horn of Africa. Despite growing investments in durable solutions by development actors, the stated programmatic goals of restoring self-reliance, dignity and stability to displacement-affected communities remain elusive. Instead, climatic stressors, especially drought, regularly undermine the stability that solutions programming is intended to deliver. The blog calls for a fundamental shift in how durable solutions are understood in the context of climate change. Experience in the Horn of Africa demonstrates that durable solutions must be positioned not as a fixed end-state achieved once people have returned home or resettled elsewhere and pre-displacement conditions have been restored, but as an ongoing adaptive process that enables people and communities to build the capacities needed to adapt to future environmental shocks. Otherwise, the author argues, communities that appear to be progressing toward self-reliance are likely to experience re-displacement, protracted displacement and other setbacks as subsequent climate shocks erode recovery gains.

This incisive and provocative blog calls attention to the failure of IDP governance and humanitarian systems in Nigeria to adjust to the urbanisation of displacement. Drawing on a ten-city interdisciplinary research project conducted over a seven-year period, the article argues that despite the highly visible shift toward IDP self-settlement in urban centres, established IDP protection systems and actors blindly cling to decreasingly relevant paradigms that prioritise conflict zones and IDP camps. This has left the growing number of urban IDPs in Nigeria without adequate rights protections and structurally excluded from urban services and institutions, even as their presence profoundly reshapes urban spaces. The author argues that IDP rights protections and the provision of lasting solutions must be embedded within mainstream systems of urban governance. Government and humanitarian actors need to move beyond treating internal displacement as an exceptional but temporary humanitarian emergency and, instead, recognise urban IDPs as long-term residents whose inclusion is essential to equitable and sustainable urban and national development.