This third article in the miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, highlights the complexities of the planned relocation of the Guna island community in Panama, as they moved from their island of Gardi Sugdub to the mainland site of Isberyala. The author, an Indigenous leader, community member and trained biologist, played an important role in bridging government assessments and requirements with the Indigenous community’s distinctive worldview, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge—dimensions impossible to capture through externally conducted technical studies.

The Guna experience demonstrates that communities have the capacity to lead complex processes when they receive recognition, resources, and technical assistance. However, a truly successful planned relocation should not be measured by the completion or delivery of houses but by families' ability to adapt and live dignified and sustainable lives in their new homes. Outcomes at the new site must be evaluated over time and across generations.

The series is published in collaboration with the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation.

This second article in RID's miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, is an insightful analysis of the challenges faced by community members involved in a planned relocation initiated after the Puthumala landslide of 2019 in Wayanad, Kerala, India. Written by researchers who have worked with this community, the article details the challenges the community faced both during relocation and five years after moving to their new site, including promises made, implementation problems and the difficult realities of everyday life after relocation. Through the account, the authors spotlight important lessons for governments, non-governmental actors, and communities themselves about prioritising a community's shared infrastructure during development, livelihoods and access to employment, and access to grievance and feedback mechanisms. Above all, this article shows that planned relocation processes do not end when a new house is constructed; they require long-term support and monitoring for many years to come.

The series is published in collaboration with the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation.

This first article in RID's miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, is a moving account of the challenges faced by community members of El Bosque, Tabasco, Mexico, who began to plan relocation in 2022 due to severe coastal erosion. Written by members of two organisations that have advocated for the community, the article recounts the successful legal and communications campaign that persuaded the Government of Mexico to support relocation, as well as the challenges faced during a planned relocation process that did not fully prioritise a participatory, rights-based approach.

The article calls on the Mexican government to remedy the harms to the community while ensuring better future programming through policy changes. It also offers vital lessons for governments, communities and development actors around the globe on community participation, transparent and constant communication, focus on economic and non-economic loss and damage and the need for continuous access to livelihoods, education and health services.

As the Russian war on Ukraine grinds on and the impacts of Ukraine’s resistance and counterattack spread inland in Russia, the conflict is taking its toll not only on Ukrainians but on Russian civilians, in particular, the large but underreported internally displaced population of Russians forced to flee their homes by the conflict. Building on an earlier piece written by the author for RID, this new research article examines the true extent of internal displacement in Russia and the growing challenges of IDPs, with particular focus on Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk, three of the most impacted regions. The article spotlights the inadequacy of official efforts to protect and compensate people displaced by the conflict, reflecting both the absence of the category of "internally displaced persons" in Russian law and Russia's apparent reticence to formally acknowledge the extent of displacement and, thereby, its responsibility toward internally displaced persons. This reticence, the article argues, is linked to increasingly dire national finances, depleted by the cost of the war and international economic sanctions. More fundamentally, however, it reflects the Russian government's unwillingness to acknowledge, even indirectly, that the "special military operation", now in its fifty-sixth month, has not gone according to plan.

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.

Internal displacement is a major societal challenge worldwide, with far-reaching consequences for the tens of millions of people displaced annually as well as for affected communities and society as a whole. As such, the low level of interest in this phenomenon among researchers and policymakers represents a puzzle. A new Handbook of Internal Displacement seeks to change this situation by raising the profile of the issue for researchers, teachers, policymakers, funders, humanitarian workers and development actors and addressing the wide range of dynamics, debates and challenges that internal displacement entails. This groundbreaking publication provides extensive regional analysis of displacement in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and offers a distinctive global vision of “internal displacement” as an emerging field of research and practice.

This insightful blog examines how internally displaced persons (IDPs) in India are disenfranchised from voting and participating fully in civic life. Widespread failure to recognise people’s displacement status and circumstances shifts many of the burdens of proving identity, residence and voter eligibility onto the shoulders of already traumatised people. IDPs fleeing disasters, conflict or communal violence may have lost their homes and documentation, crossed state boundaries and taken refuge in regions where their native languages are not spoken. Digital access challenges and bureaucratic inefficiencies place the burden of administrative adaptation on those least able to bear it. Too many IDPs are thereby excluded from voter lists. Though India records large numbers of new disaster displacements every year, it does not maintain a consolidated national displacement database. Such a database, the author argues, would ensure the voting and other rights of internally displaced persons are protected while providing a much-needed tool for monitoring whether IDPs are progressing toward durable solutions.